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In August 2019, Eduardo Rosas was very clear about two things: his path to financial freedom and that there was very little information about it. So I created the YouTube channel ‘Personal Finance’ , with more than half a million subscribers. There, the finance expert talks about everything related to money, from investments and retirement plans, to credit card reviews and how to generate new sources of income.
“Learning to invest can make the difference between reaching our financial goals and inflation eating away at your savings ,” Eduardo said during his participation in the interactive personal finance festival Money Fest 2021 . “It can also be the difference between raising enough money to stop working at some point, or having to work even in our old age, perhaps on something we don’t like.”
These are the 5 basic points to start investing according to Rosas:
1. Define your goal
“We cannot start investing or define what steps to follow without first knowing where we want to go,” he explains. For this we must answer three questions:
– So that? This helps us to visualize what we want to achieve and the importance of our goal, and it will drive us to continue investing. It can be buying a house or raising money to retire comfortably.
– How many? For example, if you want to save for retirement, Rosas says that “we will need to gather 20 to 25 times what we spend a year, you can take as a reference what you spend at this moment, multiply it by 25 and that put it in the inflation calculator, to know how much you have to save and invest for your retirement. “ The important thing is to have an amount in mind that is in line with your ‘what for?’
– When? It is important to set a deadline for that goal, to define if you need to collect that amount for a specific moment: one year, five, ten or more.
Once these questions are answered, you can define your goal in a single sentence , for example: “I have to raise 5 million pesos for my retirement in 37 years.” Write that phrase on a piece of paper that you can have on hand to continually visualize your priority and avoid getting out of the way.