The Minimal Investor

A Minimal Investor is someone who…

• Understands the why behind every investment they’re invested in.
• Invests in the minimal number of funds needed for diversification.
• Reduces financial advisor fees to their minimum.
• Reduces expense ratio fees to their minimum.
• Reduce time spent thinking about and organizing investments to a minimum.
• Reduces taxes to their minimum.

The result of these simple guidelines is that you’ll only invest in things you know what they are and why you’d want to invest in them. You’ll know you aren’t getting ripped off because you understand every investment. But just as important – you’ll know enough about investing to confidently invest for the rest of your life in this minimal style.

What You’ll Learn In This Course

During this course, you’ll learn how to make informed investments on your own without a financial advisor.

After completing this course, you’ll understand the why behind your investments and feel comfortable making them on your own.

In the months and years following this course, you’ll become more and more familiar with managing your investments, rebalancing as needed, and not stressing out when the market fluctuates.

The Structure of This Course

This course was created as an email course with one lesson each week before being transformed into the content you see here. It still follows that same flow of one lesson = one topic.

We’ll start with the basics and continue to build a solid foundation for investing. Being a Minimal Investor isn’t complicated. We’ll focus on the most significant actionable takeaways and the minimum amount of work.

In each lesson, you’ll have tasks to accomplish to follow along. You’ll learn how to open an investment account, how to choose funds for it, how to invest those funds, and manage them. We’ll use Vanguard for this and walk through the process step by step. These tactics will work regardless of where you invest your money.

In these ten lessons, you’ll learn a lot – but only if you follow along and participate in the activities.

My Journey as a Minimal Investor

When I was 23 years old, my mom passed away. I inherited $100,000. Not knowing what to do, I stuck with the bank my mom was using – and a financial advisor there. I didn’t even know how to transfer money between banks, so let the advisor make the decisions for me.

For years I invested that way. I asked “why?” for every recommendation and learned the basics of investing. I learned how much I paid in fees and it made me sick to my stomach. Advisory fees can eat up as much as 30% of gains each year! After a few years of this, I read a book that gave me an amazing investing foundation: The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing. Soon after I started to invest small amounts on my own.

I continued to invest small amounts as I earned money for 2 more years – all while learning the various investment rules, fees, and terms. In the 12 years since I grew this $100,000 to over $1,000,000 in large part due to the simple strategies in this course.

This isn’t a course about how to pick “hot” stocks. It’s about how to get rich slowly by making calculated decisions with time on your side. This 10-lesson course boils down what took me two years to learn on my own into a few hands-on activities you can work through in only a few hours.