The majority of Americans believe that $60,000 is the earning threshold at which one is ready to start investing.
Will you finally be ready to start investing once you get that raise? When your student loans are paid off? Or when that bonus finally lives up to expectations?
If you believe that a small salary bump is all that is keeping you from trying out the stock market, you’re certainly not alone — a recent Parler study found that more than half of Americans believe that $60,000 is the salary threshold at which one can start investing.
While 57% of people earning less than $60,000 have never invested, more than half of the 2,000 surveyed for the study found that it was enough to start entering the stock market.
Spoiler Alert: Your Salary Will Never Feel Like Enough
Whether it’s justified or unjustified, the feeling that one does not earn enough money is a very common reason for people to avoid investing — a recent Business Insider survey found that nearly half of millennials feel they do not currently earn enough money and are waiting until that changes to start investing.
But while investing confidence does rise in proportion to higher earnings (82% of those earning above $150,000 felt confident in their investing smarts while only 34% of those making under $30,000 did), actually skills rarely do in tandem.
“Eight in 10 of all respondents drew a blank when asked to explain what a ‘bond’ is — and while nearly six in 10 claimed to be familiar with the concept of ‘hedge funds,’ seven in 10 couldn’t match it with the corresponding definition,” reads the Parler report.
Just Take The Investing Plunge, Some Say
With respondents believing that an average of 22% of one’s income should be put toward investing, there is a point at which that is simply not feasible — those who struggle to meet their day-to-day needs or have crushing debt may definitely better off holding off their financial situation changes.
Parler
But at the same time, waiting for that elusive moment when you feel like you’ve “made it” to start investing is also a mistake. Instead, those who are interested in investing should start experimenting with small amounts of money to learn the ropes on one’s own — survey respondents, in turn, chose cryptocurrency (57%) and stocks/bonds (56%) as the most high-risk investments.
“Many think they need more money to begin investing than they generally do,” Gunnar Cuevas, CEO of investing app CARL, said in a statement. “Approximately one-third of the respondents who had never invested indicated that the primary reason was not having enough money to do so. In reality, no amount is too small to begin investing with.”
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