Mallon FitzPatrick, managing director and head of wealth planning at Robertson Stephens, offers some tips for how first-time investors can dip their toe into the stock market. 


<div class="block">Mallon FitzPatrick, managing director and head of wealth planning at Robertson Stephens, offers some tips for how first-time investors can dip their toe into the stock market. </div>
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Wake Up With Cheddar

Stretching Your Dollar: How to Dip Your Toe Into the Stock Market 

Welcome back, everyone. I'm Shannon Lanier and I'm, and now to stretching your dollar, say you're a homeowner or even a renter and you've got a little spare money each paycheck, you're thinking about dipping your toe into investing, but you've never dabbled before. It can be really intimidating idea. So, this morning, we're joined by financial expert, Malan Fitzpatrick, principal, managing director and head of wealth planning at Robertson Stevens to offer us some insight for first time investors. Maly. Welcome. Uh Thanks for having me here. We're thrilled to have you. So, if you've never invested your money before, it does seem a little intimidating. What do you do? Is it worth it? Is it absolutely is intimidating. But I, I think if you have some of the basics down um with your um financial plan, um investing should be uh a little less intimidating. Uh Let's start off with the idea of budgeting. Um, budgeting sounds terrible. So let's call it a spending plan like that. Let's, let's, let's let's have a spending plan that's gonna meet your goals and let's let's make this easy, right? Let's have a framework, 50 30 2050% of your income goes to the needs, right. Spending on houses spending on cars, 30% to want and, and those are the more fun stuff, entertainment, um, going out to eat anything you want. Right. And 20% this is where the investment comes in is going to go to savings. Um, don't worry about getting in that 50 30 20 right away, but make a slow move toward that. It's, it's a target. Um, keep, um the best way to uh kind of keep that budget is to keep things separate, right? So separate account for needs uh expenses, separate account for wants expenses and then take automatic savings from your checking account. Put that to the broker, you have to get, you have to collect money before you can invest. And I like to different accounts. So then you're not dipping and diving in each of those accounts all the time. But, you know, for a lot of people, they feel like they're living check to check. So say, for example, if you only have $50 to invest in that 20% that you have. Yeah, what should you do with it? So, um I think your first priority for savings is an emergency fund, right? So that is, so I wouldn't even really invest that. I would um put it away for those times that you might actually lose your job, which you know, there's recession risk out there, who, who knows how likely it is. But don't want to think about it. You wanna be prepared for that. Um, and, uh, keep that account separate, um, fund it for, um, if you're single, don't have any dependents, you could fund that with the less, maybe three months of expenses, six months of expenses is better. Um, if you have dependents, you're, you know, part of a family, people are depending on you. Um, it's six months of expense to 12 months expenses. So once you fill that up, um I think then you can start to think to um, of how to invest, right? We have about a minute left, but as you know, there are all sorts of investments out there from high yield accounts to mutual funds. Can you talk us through some of the key ones here? Sure. Um So you want to, um, especially if you're saving for retirement, you want to use a, um, a 401k plan. Um, if your employer provides it or if not an Ira or a Roth Ira, these are tax advantaged accounts, um, investments. Um You, you wanna, you wanna pay um, the minimal amount of fees. So ETF S are a good option. You wanna stay diversified and you want to invest for the long term, right? So, uh the rule of thumb around here is if you're younger, allocate your investments more to um uh stock ETF S and as you get older, you want to take less risk and allocate to more maybe bond ETF S um for the first time in a long time bonds are actually paying you money, which is great. So you could probably get a um, pretty low risk rate of, you know, around 5% on bonds. I love these tips. Thank you so much, financial expert, Malan Fitzpatrick. And coming up, we are moments away from the opening bell. Stick with us to see how stocks open for trading. Don't go anywhere.