When You're Ready to Invest
The readiness checklist and dollar-cost averaging your first $10K
You've read enough about compound interest to know that starting early matters. You've seen the charts. You've felt the urgency.
But urgency without readiness is how people invest their rent money in meme stocks, lose 40% in a correction, panic-sell, and swear off the stock market for five years. The paradox: starting early is critical, but starting before you're ready is destructive. This lesson gives you the exact checklist — five prerequisites that, once met, mean you can invest with confidence that no short-term market decline will force you into a bad decision.
These are sequential gates, not suggestions. Each one protects you from a specific failure mode that destroys wealth. (1) Emergency fund funded: 3-6 months of essential expenses in cash or near-cash.
This prevents forced selling. (2) High-interest debt cleared: all debt above 8% APR eliminated. This prevents negative-carry (paying 24% while earning 10% is a guaranteed loss).
That is the opening. Finishing a lesson is where it stops being interesting and starts being useful: the full lesson runs to 7 sections and ends with 5 practice questions. A free account is what opens the rest, and the other 255 lessons in the Academy with it. No card.
What this lesson covers
- 1The five prerequisites to investing
- 2S&P 500 loss frequency by holding period
- 3Dollar-cost averaging: your first $10K
- 4Worked example: DCA through a volatile period
- 5The readiness checklist — pass/fail
- 6Your readiness assessment
- 7Your first allocation: keep it simple