January is the beginning of a new year. New Year New You, let’s get our money RIGHT!
Cassandra Cummings is the founder of The Stocks & Stilettos Society, an online community of more than 100,000 women investors. In less than two years, she has inspired over 50,000 women worldwide to invest more than $10M in assets through her guidance.
Dr. Renee: So what is being taught about stocks in your stock challenge?
Cassandra Cummings: The stock challenge really is stocks one on one. It teaches you basically how to read a ticker symbol. What to look for. Because a lot of times people say, do your research, do your own research, do your due diligence. And so people are like, what does that look like? What should I be looking for? We show you how to research stocks so you can identify whether this is a great place for you to park your money and invest because the only reason why we’re investing is to make money. We wanna make sure that we’re putting our coins in things that return interest and appreciation to us. And so the three weeks walks you through that tells you how to identify dividend-paying stocks. It also talks a lot about compounding interest which is critical to investing.
Dr. Renee: It blew me away to know that there’s a woman in Chicago living off of dividends. What are dividends and also what is compound interest?
Cassandra Cummings: A dividend is sleep coin essentially. Right? So a company has profit and they share it with you just because you’re a shareholder you’ve decided to invest in their company and they incentivize you by giving you some extra money to go along with being a shareholder. There are some dividend Kings, there are some dividend aristocrats, and then you have the dividend champions, contenders and challengers. Basically they’re broken up into different categories that tell you how many years they’ve given out a dividend consecutively and those companies that have not only given out a dividend consecutively, but if they’ve even increased their dividend over a certain period of time. So compound interest is where your money is making money. And so a quick example of that would be sort of like a multiplier effect. So let’s just say you have a couple of babies and then those babies have a couple of babies and then those kids have kids. Everybody’s multiplying. Right? You want that for your money. And so that’s really the compound effect.
Dr. Renee: Please explain what an ETF is?
Cassandra Cummings: It’s an exchange traded fund, which is basically a basket of stocks. So in your ETF basket, you could have Nike, you could have apple, you could have Facebook. So it’s gonna be just a basket of stocks. So if you don’t, if you’re not ready, you don’t feel comfortable. Like I don’t wanna put my money in just one company. I wanna spread my eggs around this. ETF would be a great way to do that because it’s already a one stop shop for you. ETFs are a special type of mutual fund. They work a little differently than mutual funds because they’re less expensive, but they have a higher liquidity amount. So if you wanna get access to your money much faster, you can. But they’re usually a fraction of what a mutual fund company will charge because they’re usually passively managed versus a mutual fund, which is actively managed.
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