You Don't Have Enough Money to Invest. You Don't Know Enough to Invest. Both Objections Are Solvable.

When people explain why they don’t invest, the answers cluster around two things. Either they don’t have enough money to get started — or they don’t know what they’re doing and don’t want to find out the expensive way.

Both of these are solvable problems. They just require different tools.

The Money Objection

“I’ll start investing when I have more saved up.” This one sounds responsible. It’s usually procrastination.

The minimum investment at most traditional brokerages used to be $1,000 or more. That’s changed. Platforms built for retail investors now accept starting amounts as low as $5 — and they mean it. You’re not buying a fraction of an account or getting a watered-down version of the product. You’re buying fractional shares of real stocks and ETFs, receiving the same proportional returns and dividends as someone who invested $5,000.

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 can’t recover the compounding time you don’t use.

The Knowledge Objection

“I don’t know enough about stocks to invest.” This one is more honest.

The solution depends on what you mean by it. 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.

The tools below address both situations.

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. 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.

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); 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.

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.

Using Both Together

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, 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.

What Neither of These Is

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.

A Note for Canadian Readers

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.

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.