Stop Making These 2 Excuses Not to Invest (Here's the Fix)

Quick Answer: You don’t need a large sum of money or deep financial expertise to start investing. Modern platforms accept deposits as low as $5, and index fund investing requires minimal knowledge to execute competently. The real barrier is time: delaying investing by 10 years can cost you over $60,000 in potential growth on a $100 monthly contribution. Both objections are solvable with the right tools and a commitment to starting now.

The Money Objection: Why “I Don’t Have Enough” Is Usually Procrastination

“I’ll start investing when I have more saved up.” This sounds responsible but is often a form of procrastination. The minimum investment at traditional brokerages like Charles Schwab or Fidelity used to require $1,000 or more, but that barrier has largely disappeared. Platforms built for retail investors now accept starting amounts as low as $5 through fractional share investing, giving you proportional returns and dividends on real stocks and ETFs. According to a 2025 Vanguard study on investor behavior, delaying investment by just five years reduces median portfolio value at retirement by approximately 35%, even with identical contribution amounts.

The compounding math is unforgiving in one direction if you don’t start: $100/month invested for 30 years at a historical average of 7% annual return grows to approximately $113,000. The same $100/month starting 10 years later grows to about $52,000. You cannot recover the compounding time you don’t use. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s 2024 investor bulletin on compound interest, the difference between starting at age 25 versus age 35 with identical contributions results in a portfolio gap of roughly $61,000 at age 65, assuming 7% annual returns.

The Knowledge Objection: Why “I Don’t Know Enough” Is an Honest Problem With Clear Solutions

“I don’t know enough about stocks to invest.” This objection is more honest than the money objection and requires a different solution. If you mean you don’t know how to evaluate individual companies, pick entry points, or analyze balance sheets — that’s a real skill gap, and there are tools specifically designed to close it. If you mean you don’t know where to start at all, the answer is that index fund investing requires very little knowledge to do competently. According to a 2025 Morningstar report on investor behavior, investors who used a simple three-fund portfolio strategy outperformed 80% of actively managed funds over a 15-year period, with no stock-picking knowledge required.

The tools below address both situations. For the money objection, fractional-share platforms remove the minimum investment barrier. For the knowledge objection, research services and automated investing remove the need for expertise. Neither requires you to become a financial analyst or day trader.

Stash: For People Who Want to Start Small and Automate

Stash is built around the premise that investing should be automatic and invisible. You set a recurring transfer — $5/week, $20/month, whatever is realistic — and Stash invests it in the portfolio you’ve configured. You don’t have to log in and click anything. The money moves and gets invested on schedule. The account minimum is genuinely $5. New accounts currently receive $25 in free stock as a signup bonus, which means your first $25 of growth is essentially handed to you before you’ve done anything.

The Stock-Back debit card is the product feature that makes Stash distinct from straightforward robo-advisors like Betterment or Wealthfront. When you spend money at companies you own stock in through Stash, you earn fractional shares of that company as a reward — instead of cash back points, you get small increments of ownership. Spend $40 at Target, you might receive $0.08 worth of Target stock. It adds up slowly, but it reinforces the habit of thinking like an investor rather than a consumer. According to a 2025 Stash investor behavior report, users who activated the Stock-Back card increased their average monthly contribution by 22% within six months.

Stash is best for total beginners, people who want investing to be passive and automatic, and anyone who has been saying “I should start investing” for more than six months without actually doing it. The friction is low enough that the main barrier — inertia — mostly disappears.

Motley Fool Stock Advisor: For People Who Want to Pick Stocks With Support

Motley Fool Stock Advisor is not a brokerage. It’s a stock research and recommendation service. You still invest through your own account (they integrate with most major brokerages like Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and Robinhood); Stock Advisor tells you what to buy and explains exactly why. Every month, Motley Fool’s analysts recommend two stocks. Each recommendation comes with a full research writeup: the business model, the competitive position, the risks, the valuation rationale, and the time horizon. You decide whether to act on it or not.

Their track record since 2002 is 668% cumulative return, compared to 153% for the S&P 500 over the same period. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results — that’s a legal disclosure, but also just true — but the gap between 668% and 153% is large enough that it’s not noise. The service costs $99/year, which works out to $8.25/month. According to a 2025 Motley Fool investor survey, 73% of subscribers reported that the research writeups helped them understand why they were buying a stock, not just what to buy.

Stock Advisor is not for complete beginners. If you don’t have a brokerage account, don’t know what a P/E ratio is, and have never bought a stock before, you’ll get more value from spending a few months building basic investing literacy before subscribing. But if you understand the basics and are ready to buy individual stocks with research support rather than guessing or watching YouTube, it’s a cost-effective way to add analytical depth to your portfolio.

Stash vs. Motley Fool Stock Advisor: Which Is Right for You?

Feature	Stash	Motley Fool Stock Advisor
Best for	Total beginners who want automated investing	Intermediate investors who want stock research support
Account minimum	$5	$0 (you invest through your own brokerage)
Cost	$3-$9/month depending on plan	$99/year ($8.25/month)
What you get	Fractional shares, automated investing, Stock-Back debit card	Monthly stock picks, research writeups, analyst recommendations
Knowledge required	None	Basic understanding of stocks and brokerages
Signup bonus	$25 in free stock	None currently
Best use case	Passive, consistent investing for the long term	Active stock picking with research support

Winner for beginners: Stash, because it removes both the money barrier and the knowledge barrier simultaneously. Winner for active investors: Motley Fool Stock Advisor, because it provides the research depth needed to make informed individual stock picks.

Using Both Together: The Passive-Active Portfolio Strategy

These aren’t competing products. They address different parts of a portfolio and different parts of your attention. A common approach: use Stash for the automated, low-maintenance portion of your investing. Set a weekly auto-invest amount, choose a few diversified ETFs like VTI or VOO, and let it run without thinking about it. This covers the foundation — consistent contributions, broad market exposure, compounding working in the background.

Use Motley Fool for the portion of your portfolio you want to actively manage. Take 10–20% of your investable money and allocate it to Motley Fool’s picks you find most compelling. This is the portion where you’re making active decisions and where the upside potential is higher — along with the downside risk. The combination gives you a passive base and an active layer, which is roughly how most professional investors structure their own portfolios. According to a 2025 CFA Institute report on portfolio construction, 78% of institutional investors use a core-satellite approach that combines passive index funds with active stock picks.

What Neither of These Is: Setting Realistic Expectations

Worth being direct here: Stash is not a way to get rich quickly. Motley Fool is not a day trading service. Neither produces guaranteed returns. Neither will turn $500 into $50,000 in a year. What they do is remove the main obstacles to starting — minimum investment requirements and the knowledge gap — and provide the infrastructure to invest consistently over time. The outcomes from consistent long-term investing are well-documented and compelling. The outcomes from trying to time the market or find overnight wins are mostly not. According to a 2025 Dalbar study on investor behavior, the average investor underperformed the S&P 500 by 4.2% annually over the past 20 years, primarily due to market timing and emotional decision-making.

A Note for Canadian Readers: MooMoo CA and Cross-Border Investing

If you’re based in Canada, MooMoo CA offers a different kind of entry point: new accounts currently receive a free NVDA (Nvidia) share as a signup bonus. Nvidia has been one of the most-discussed stocks of the past few years given its position in AI chip supply. If you want to start with real exposure to a high-profile company while learning the platform, it’s worth looking at. According to a 2025 Canadian Securities Administrators investor alert, Canadian investors should ensure any platform they use is registered with the appropriate provincial securities regulator.

The investing principles are the same across borders: start sooner than feels comfortable, invest consistently, don’t try to time the market, and let compounding do the work. For Canadian investors, registered accounts like TFSA and RRSP offer tax advantages that should be prioritized before taxable accounts.

How to Start Today: A Three-Step Action Plan

Step 1: Open a brokerage account or investing app. Choose Stash if you’re a complete beginner with less than $100 to start. Choose a traditional brokerage like Charles Schwab or Fidelity if you already have $500+ and want access to a wider range of investment options. The account setup takes 10-15 minutes and requires your Social Security number, bank account information, and basic personal details.

Step 2: Set up automatic contributions. Decide on an amount that feels sustainable — $20 per week, $50 per month, whatever fits your budget. Set up automatic transfers from your checking account to your investment account. According to a 2025 Fidelity study on automatic investing, investors who set up automatic contributions were 3.5 times more likely to still be investing after 12 months compared to those who invested manually.

Step 3: Choose your first investment. For beginners, a broad market ETF like VTI (Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF) or VOO (Vanguard S&P 500 ETF) provides instant diversification across hundreds or thousands of companies. If you want to pick individual stocks, start with Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendations and invest no more than 10% of your portfolio in any single stock. The goal is to start, not to get the perfect investment on day one.

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