A great way to invest for retirement is to use the Robinhood brokerage app. The app allows you to buy and sell stocks, ETFS, and options from your phone. Although Robinhood does not offer an IRA, they are a great place to invest some of your after-tax funds as they do not charge any commissions.
When you sign up for a free brokerage account with Robinhood through my referral link they will give us both a free share of stock. The stock you receive is chosen at random and will be worth between $2.50 and $200. When I signed up the stock I received was worth about $2.93. The value of the stock you receive will most likely be worth about $2.50, but some people get lucky and get a more valuable stock. According to Robinhood you have a 1 in 250 chance to get a share of Apple, Facebook, or Berkshire Hathaway. That isn’t bad odds for something that will only cost you a few minutes of your time.
Robinhood is an app that allows you to make commission free stock, option, and ETF trades from your phone. They also have a desktop site you can use if you don’t want to use your phone. I was skeptical about buying stocks from my phone, but now that I have been using the app for a while I prefer using my phone and rarely use the desktop site. I like being able to just open the app on my phone and see how my portfolio is doing. Although that does lead to me checking my portfolio way more often than I should.
Of course, if you find the Robinhood brokerage account useful signing up for the free stock is an even better deal. When I signed up, I did it only for the free stock and didn’t have any plans to buy stocks through Robinhood. After selling my free stock and cashing out, I left my account dormant for about a year. Then I decided to take a flyer on the parent company of MoviePass (HMNY) and see if they could recover. That didn’t work out to well. I ended up selling the stock for pennies. I only invested $10 so it wasn’t too big of a loss.Since that purchase I have been buying stocks on a pretty regular basis. My focus is on dividend growth stocks. I’m not sure what return I’ve made on my stocks. They have done pretty well although probably not quite as well as the market overall since it has mostly been a bull market since I’ve started investing in dividend stocks. I’m not too concerned whether my stocks trail the total market a little since this is a small part of my total portfolio. The bulk of my retirement accounts are invested in index funds. I think of investing in these dividend stocks as a profitable hobby that leads to me saving more money than I would otherwise. It allows me to have a little bit of the thrill of gambling but with the odds in my favor.
If you would like to sign up for Robinhood please use my referral link and we will both get a free stock.