How to Start Investing — Even When You Have No Idea What You're Doing
I opened my first retirement account at 20 years old and had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
It was the summer between my junior and senior year of college. I was interning at a company that treated its interns like full-time employees, which meant I was eligible for benefits, so I signed up for everything I could get my hands on. When someone mentioned a 401k and used the words "employer match" and "free money" in the same breath, I was in. I didn't understand compound interest. I didn't know what an index fund was. I just knew that free money sounded like something I needed.
That account has been compounding for over 15 years, and is now worth more than four times what I put into it — and I haven't touched it since I left that company a decade ago.
That's the thing nobody tells you about investing: you don't have to have it all figured out to start. You just have to start.
Why women need to be having this conversation
Women live an average of five to six years longer than men — and yet we retire with significantly less money. We're working longer in terms of years alive, but we're not building the kind of wealth that actually funds a long life.
There are several contributors to this such as the gender wage gap and taking career breaks for caregiving. But a big piece of it is that women have historically been left out of investing conversations entirely — or talked out of taking risks with our money when we do show up.
The result is a generation of women who are great at earning and spending but haven't been taught how to make their money work for them. And that gap is expensive. Not just in the short term, but across decades — because the longer you wait to invest, the more compounding you miss out on.
Access to capital changes everything. It changes who gets to retire comfortably. It changes who gets to take risks, start businesses, and build generational wealth. And right now, more women than ever are in a position to start — we just need the knowledge and the confidence to actually do it.
The most important investing lesson I learned from a startup job
In my late 20s, I was working as a social media manager at a scrappy early-stage startup. The founder was in the middle of raising a Series A — $15 million from venture capital investors. I had never heard of venture capital. I didn't know what a seed round was. I genuinely thought it was wild that you could walk into a room with an idea and walk out with millions of dollars.
But the more I paid attention, the more I realized something: I was asking harder questions than the investors who were writing those checks. When I raised concerns about the business model, I got reprimanded. When COVID hit a year later, I turned out to be right.
That moment planted a seed. Maybe I had the brain for this. Maybe I didn't need the fancy VC job or the generational wealth or the right last name. Maybe I just needed the knowledge and the nerve.
That's when I started learning about angel investing — and decided that one day, I wanted to be the one writing the checks.
You don't need money to start. You need knowledge.
At the start of the year finally I made my first angel investment. I wrote a small check into a company I believe in. While yes, I hope to get a financial return, I also invested in proximity, education, and the seat at the table that comes with making the investment.
Here's what I want you to take away from this: don't wait until you have money to learn how to invest it. The knowledge has to come first. Things can shift faster than you think, and when they do, you want to be ready.
Lucky girls don't wait for permission to get their money up. They learn the game early — and then they play it on their own terms.
How to Invest Your Way to a Luckier Life is out now. Listen to the full episode of She's So Lucky wherever you get your podcasts.
