How to Invest $1000 – $10,000 (If I were in my 20’s)

Whether I only had $1000 to invest or 10K to invest I would almost always invest it the same way.

And the ideas we’ll go over are not what you would traditionally think about when you think of investing, but I think it can be very valuable especially if you’re in your 20s.

Now what you typically hear is investing in assets like stocks, ETFS, dividends, the S&P 500 and REITs if you wanted to invest in real estate without actually owning property itself.

But I would not go this route at all. I am not saying that investing in these assets won’t make you money over time, but these safer investments won’t do much for you when you don’t have much invested.

Even with an 8% return with $1000 invested, you would be looking at $80 at the end of the year. There is a lot more you can do with those funds to make money on your money besides investing in those traditional assets.

Also, with stocks you don’t have any control on how your investment performs, so we’ll go over some better ways I personally would have done if I were in my 20s again. Where you have more control of what happens and use the money in more strategic ways that would ultimately serve you and your pockets better.

How should I Invest $1000 in my 20s?

Investing $1000 in your 20s can be a big deal depending on where you sit financially. Assuming it’s a meaningful amount of money, we’ve put together a list of items that may not be typically top of mind. We believe investing in a skill, education and hustle, which we reveal in this article, is a great starting point.

Invest in a skill

Ok If you have $1000 or even $10,000 to your name, then you may want to find out how to spend some of that money to learn a skill that can allow you to make more money than what you’re currently making.

You can pay to get licensed, certified or pay for education (which we’ll actually talk about more in a moment) that teaches you a specific skill that you can leverage to make more money.

So, for example let’s say you want to invest in assets like real estate, well instead of putting that into a REIT, one way you can approach this is by spending the $1000 to get your real estate license. This way you can learn more about the industry and increase the ability for you to earn more by getting commissions on houses that you sell.

Here in Houston, I think the average house value is like 250-300K. If you sold a house at that price you would make around 2-3% commission on that sale. That’s about a $9000 commission on one sold listing, and something you would not have been able to do unless you were licensed. So, this $1000 you invested in yourself to get a license would have given you the ability to earn way more than what you would have made letting it sit passively in an asset like a reit instead.

Huge difference!

Now that you have increased the amount you can make by a lot, now you can take a portion of those profits and park it in a passive invest vehicle like stocks. This is something I would personally only do ONLY after I found a way to make a lot more money.

Now we would make it a goal to try to keep as much of the earned income that you make every month and invest all of that into yourself in the means of building on that skill or investing in knowledge in an area that the market has proven that there is a demand for.

So that brings me to…

Investing in Education

When I was in my 20’s I thought I knew what I wanted and how to get there. But I didn’t and wish I would have invested in learning more about what I don’t know. And when you’re in your 20s there is a lot that you may not know, I know that was the case for me.

If I were to go back in time, I would buy a lot more courses and fast track my learning, instead of finding things out the hard way.

If you only have $1000 then you may want to take a portion of the funds and buy audibles and books in areas that you want to learn, which should align with your goals on making more money.

If you are closer to the 10K mark, then you could buy a few courses each year and build on a skill and become an expert in something that allows you to earn more.

The education you learn in these courses will develop your mind, your way of thinking and give you new ideas on how to get to the next financial milestone.

Let’s use an example, let say you bought a course on editing videos like a pro. You buy the course, apply what you learn and start working on developing this skill. You then start making more money by posting your service for sale on Upwork or Fiverr.

After you build this up to a successful side business, you can then purchase a course on how to scale your business or how to create your own website and learn how to drive traffic to your own site, instead of depending on only getting work from Upwork and Fiverr.

You start stacking your knowledge on top of each other and over time you have built something serious that is earning you a lot of money. And this all started from the 1000 or 10K you started with.

Your efforts have compounded on top of each other, much quicker than using the money and letting it sit in the stock market.

The last way I would use the 1K or even 10K, is invest it in things that I could flip for more.

Flip items for more

Hear me out, if you have seen my other videos, you know that when I was broke in 2018, I flipped my way to almost half a million my first year flipping stuff. It was roughly 420K in one year.

At that point I didn’t even have 1000 dollars to start with, I had to sell stuff around my house and made about $800 from that. I then took the $800 and used that is my starting capital to flip things for more.

I would not be in the position I’m in today if I didn’t apply everything that I’m talking about in this article. It doesn’t matter if you wanted to start flipping couches, watches, antiques, cheap cars, toys, electronics, or items you find from thrift stores, really whatever you can think of.

I’ve seen some flippers make a lot of money quickly flipping couches by finding them cheap, cleaning them up and selling them for more.

They are quickly turning that cash and are now making 20K a month flipping furniture.

Buying things at a good deal and flipping it for more, is a tried-and-true way to make your money, make money!

I know that this is going to be an unpopular opinion and stance that I’m taking. If you do a quick google search on how to invest $1000, almost every single article is telling you to put it into stocks.

So you then want to ask yourself, what is your ultimate goal with the capital that you have.

Are you looking for a safe route and make money slowly and build it over many, many years. Or are you trying to leverage the capital and will to take an active role in making your money, make you more money!

It’s a question you want to ask because it will create a clear path of which direction you want to go in. I’ve always been a big advocate of creating a cash cow and then funneling those profits in multiple buckets that each serve a purpose and help create some diversification.

And in these buckets, only after I have increased my ability to earn more, do I then start allocating a portion of funds into other safer, passive investment vehicles such as stocks, and continue to invest in it and over the years create a well balanced portfolio of assets that are making me money.

When you start with this safer and slower option first, you won’t make much of an immediate impact on your financial situation. If you’re barely making it by or don’t have a lot of excess capital every month to deploy on investing, then the name of the game changes to how can I create more excess funds each month to have the ability to invest more.

Whether it’s investing in learning that new skill, education, flipping things or stocks if you end up wanting to take that route first.

And that will come down to 2 levers that you can pull on. One is increasing your earned income and second is finding a way to lower your expenses, so that you can quickly save up more money that you can invest.

The increase in the amount of money you keep each month will then allow you to invest more freely, take on more risk and not make any decision based on fear because it says the last $1000 you have left to invest. Right?!

Because you know that you have excess capital every month that’s coming in.

I really lived this life of being broke and taking the little that I had and making my money work for me.

Flip Academy Newsletter

WAIT! Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter…. Look I get it, everyone and their momma has a newsletter.

BUT, ours is sooooo good, that if you don’t like the first one we send, you can simply unsubscribe! AND, ill even Venmo you a $1 if you really are disappointed lol.

We aim to provide the most value and resources for you to level up your finances, business, side hustle, along with important News that may affect you.

See you in your inbox 😉.