For most people, investing seems like a daunting and complex task that only the people of Wall Street can do.

The reality is that you don’t need to work on Wall Street to start investing. By understanding the basics of investing, only saving a few dollars every month will grow with compound interest.

Budgeting

The key to building long-term wealth starts with developing good habits and understanding your expenses. Tracking your income and expenses sounds boring since nobody wants to take the time and input all this into excel unless you’re like me and love excel.

If you’re not a fan of spreadsheets, like most people, there are apps out there, like Mint and Clarity, etc, that can track your spending habits and give you monthly reports. The reason you should try this is you will quickly learn a few things about your financial habits that you may have not known.

I recently saw a post on LinkedIn that mentioned how much someone was saving during the current work from home environment. Over four months, the man saved over $3,000 from transportation to eating out for lunch every day at work.

Now I know everyone does not have expenses like this, but once you learn about yourself and have some money to play with, you can start creating wealth. Setting money aside to invest, can build wealth over the long term.

Once you figure how much you can allocate to investing, you can start to automate the process like your bills. Most online savings accounts and broker services have a setting where you can set up a recurring deposit every month into your account.

A good way to saving money to invest is to create an online savings account such as American Express, Marcus by Goldman Sachs, etc. Setting a savings target such as $30 a month, $10 a week, etc. is a good that will set you up to invest. Additionally, online savings accounts offer better interest rates than most banks. Starting with a small amount of money is a good way to start the process.

Since investing has become more mobile, you can invest very little so you can get comfortable with investing before making a bigger commitment. This is a great way to learn about investing while only risking a small amount of money.

Investing comes in a variety of options and investing for beginners is easier than ever before. Once you start you’ll see how addictive investing and creating wealth is.