HOW TO INVEST $100 IN 2024 (THE 5 BEST WAYS)

What's up, you guys? It's Graham here. So yes, the title you read is correct: how to invest your first $100. Yes, I said it, $100! Everyone else out there has made videos on how to invest your first $1,000, how to invest your first $10,000, how to invest your first $10 million, but what about $100? This is an amount that pretty much everybody has. Just about everyone can get started with $100 and use these same practices to eventually level up to $1,000, $10,000, $100,000, and maybe even a million dollars.

And all of this just starts with the principles of investing your first $100. With a video like this, I'm really going to make it as specific as I can. I realize most people really want just step-by-step actionable things that they can do right now in the exact order they need them. So this video is going to be exactly that. And as always, if you enjoy videos like this, just make sure, really quick, it takes one second to smash that like button. It really helps out a lot! Now let's get right into the video.

So the first investment that I would make with $100 is investing in these specific books. Now, the reality is unless you invest in a winning lottery ticket or get lucky with an early cryptocurrency ICO that just takes off, $100 by itself isn't really going to add up to much. Your highest yielding investment, by far, hands down, without a shadow of a doubt, is in education—in yourself. Education in yourself can make you millions of dollars in your lifetime, higher than anything else you can possibly invest in. This is exactly how I would spend that $100.

The first thing you're gonna do is take $11 and buy the book "Think and Grow Rich." This is a book that I started reading when I was 16 years old that absolutely changed my life. Since then, I've read the book probably five or six times, and it has had such a long-lasting impact on me. If you want to be absurdly wealthy one day, this book just gives you the step-by-step mental blueprint to achieving anything you want. I promise you, this book, by far, will be the best investment you made in yourself—it's simply reading this book.

Now the second thing you're gonna do is take $15 and buy the book "The 4-Hour Workweek." This is another book that I read when I was 19 that changed the way I thought about business, money, and time management. It's so easy for many of us to be caught up in the mentality that you need to work eight hours a day in order to feel productive and not lazy. But this book really dives into the aspects of delegating, leveraging, and setting up recurring passive income streams so that you don't need to work the standard eight hours a day.

When I read this book, to me it was really half inspirational, half actionable. It was really about extracting the most amount of value as possible for your time, regardless of how many hours you put in. So I promise you, you need to read this book. It dramatically helped me out.

Next, we have the third book here. Now, if you enjoy real estate as much as I do—which hopefully, if you're watching my channel, you enjoy real estate—you’re going to take another $20 from that and you’re gonna buy the book "The Book on Rental Property Investing: How to Create Wealth and Passive Income Through Intelligent Buy-and-Hold Real Estate Investing." Okay, so that's a really long title, but you know what they say about books with really long titles.

This book mainly talks about everything I talked about here on my channel, except it goes into much greater detail about the nuances of real estate investing with very specific examples. There definitely needs to be something said about reading material. I don't know about you guys, but I find that when I listen to something, sure, I could absorb most of the material, but when I sit down and actually read it, for some reason I can usually retain a little bit more information, and it tends to have a longer-lasting impact.

This is really one of the best practical step-by-step books out there if you want to get started with investing in real estate. So the next thing you're gonna do is take another $10 and buy the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People." This, by far, hands down, no matter what you do, no matter what business you're in, no matter how much money you have, if you have $10 to invest or a million dollars to invest, I don't care—read this book.

The reality is that no matter what business you're in, whether you work at McDonald's or you own a Fortune 500 company, in some level or another, you're dealing with people. This book is the epitome of how to deal with people, how to treat people, how to relate to people, and how to get them on your team. This book also goes into how to make it a win-win situation for everybody. So it’s not just you take, take, take. It's you giving something and getting something back in return in a way that everybody is happy.

This book goes into such great information and such great detail about how you can make that a reality. Honestly, from anything I have read, this is like the Bible for having friendships and personal relationships that are way beyond anything else you've ever had. So read this book 100%! I don’t care how much money you have or whatever you're doing—just honestly buy this book. If you buy nothing else from this list, at least this book is going to make a huge difference.

Now, I realized I've been talking for a few minutes, and we're only $56 into this, so I'm just gonna sum up the next few books really quick. I recommend you spend another $16 and you're gonna buy the book "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns." Little book, big profits—that's the second really long title here, but again, it's gonna be a good one.

After that, you're going to spend $14 on the book "Your Money or Your Life," and then finally you're gonna have $14 left over that you're gonna spend on the book "The Millionaire Next Door." So there you go, you've spent $100, and right there you've got seven lifetimes of knowledge and information at your disposal.

Just spend the next year reading through all of these books page by page, and I promise when you're done with this, you're going to have more knowledge and common sense investing acumen than 99.999% of investors out there, all from $100 spent. I promise you guys, without a shadow of a doubt, this will be the best $100 investment you can ever make in yourself. Beyond anything else possible out there, if you just do this 100%, you will not regret it.

Okay, so now the second investment that you can make with the $100 is investing in the stock market. Now, I already know there are gonna be some haters out there who are gonna get really angry, like they always do, and be like, "Graham, $100 isn't enough to invest in the stock market for any meaningful returns." So what if you make 30%? It's only $30. Stick with real estate, Graham.

And you know what? They're not entirely wrong, because I get it—you're not going to get a huge monetary return by investing $100 in the stock market. But that's not the point. The point is to exclusively do this just for the learning experience. The thing is, you can use that $100 and turn that into the best practical real-world life course on investing in the stock market that will last you a lifetime.

You will get the real firsthand experience of what it's like trading stocks. That is so far beyond what it's like just reading about it in a book. We all know what it's like to read something and understand the fundamentals of how it works in theory, but when you actually do it yourself firsthand, it's an entirely different perspective. All of a sudden you feel fear. You feel the real emotions when something you buy goes down in price, and you start self-doubting yourself. You wonder if you should sell; you question every decision you've ever made in your life. Or when something starts going up, you experience greed. You say, "How much more can this go up? Let me hold it a little bit longer!" Or you feel the frustration if you buy something and it does nothing.

These are all human emotions that impact how you do your investing. With $100 spent, you can really get the full spectrum of emotion of what it's like to invest in something firsthand.

Okay, so what's the best way to get started investing $100 in the stock market? That is opening up a Robinhood account, depositing $100 in there, and you get free stock trades. Now, I do have a link in the description where if you use my referral link, you get a free stock, and I get a free stock—these stocks are valued anywhere from $5 to basically $300. So if you want to use that link, feel free. If you don't want to use it, that's fine too. It's totally up to you.

But once you've opened your account and deposited the $100, you're ready to start trading! Now's your time to start doing research and learning about the information. Start watching free YouTube videos. Go on CNN Money, go on CNBC, go on Motley Fool, go on NerdWallet, you can go on Reddit. Start learning about candlestick charts, start learning about swing trading, start learning about everything you ever wanted—it’s all on the Internet at your disposal.

With $100 to invest and a weekend of free time, you can learn so much information online entirely for free. The entire point of investing this $100 isn't so that you can try to turn it into $1,000 or $10,000. The point of this is just to use this to begin learning about how stocks work, what you want to trade, and how you can just get started.

It's really about fully understanding the stock market and understanding the fundamentals of investing. You're not gonna be investing in something just because someone else tells you to. You're gonna be investing in something because you fully understand on your own the benefits and the fundamentals and why it's worth what it's worth and why you think it's gonna be worth more in the future.

Like, there's no point in investing $100 right now in an index fund and then holding it until you're 60. Realistically, this is going to be the best, most practical investment you can ever make if you really did do that, but it wouldn't teach you anything. I'd much rather you invest $100 and lose all of it over a weekend or a month, but have a really valuable lesson behind it than invest $100 over 40 years and have it be worth $1,000 without you fully understanding the nuances of investing.

Just trust me on this one: use your first $100 to get the best firsthand real-world experience on stock market trading—not necessarily to try to turn that $100 into like $1,000 or $10,000. Use this as an experience for firsthand knowledge.

Okay, so the third way to invest your $100 is in flipping items. There have been some really cool YouTube videos lately that have shown people that start with like a dollar, flip that into five dollars, flip that into ten dollars, and all of a sudden they end up with a thousand dollars at the end of the week. There are some really cool stuff that you can flip on eBay and Craigslist for a profit, and $100 is plenty to get started.

You could buy phones, game consoles, trading cards, electronics—whatever you know you can buy—and then flip it for a profit using Craigslist or eBay. This is one of the very few things out there that you can make a very sizable return just using your time and a little bit of capital, and in this case, it's the $100. Even on Craigslist here in the United States, you have what's called the free section. You can go use that $100, invest in some gas money, going and picking up these things, invest in ads to be posted on eBay or Craigslist, and then flip the free things for a profit.

Now, one of the things that I used to do when I was younger was flipping money. Now, this is something that cost me nothing—there was zero risk in doing this, and I would make a few hundred dollars on a weekend.

Now, this is what it is, and if you guys want to see a dedicated video on this, just comment down below. Let me know if there's enough interest, and I will make a full video on this. But basically, here's what I would do: I was really interested in old American paper currency—like I'm talking about paper currency that's older than 1980. I would go to the bank and I would just ask them, "Do you have any old American bills?" Usually they'll go through a little thing when they're not busy and say, "Yeah, you know, I got these few old hundreds and these few old twenties. Are you interested in them?" And I would say, "Yes, I am."

They will give you those bills at their face value, so you can have an old 1950 $100 bill. How much is that going to cost you at the bank? The answer is $100. So you're not losing any money when you're doing this.

What I do is I knew the values of these old American currencies prior to like 1990 or so, where you get the small-faced bills. I'll put a little picture over here so I knew that these are worth more money than their face value. For instance, I got like a 1950 something $50 bill that was a star note. I ended up selling that bill for $200. This was a $50 bill that I bought at face value for 50 bucks, and I sold it for 200.

I had other plenty of $100 bills—these were $100 star notes that were earlier than like 1990. I would sell those anywhere between $120 and $150. I'd even find old ten dollar bills that I can sell upwards of $75 to $100. This means I'm nearly ten-xing my money at zero cost to me.

And what would happen here if I got something I wasn't sure if I could sell it or not? Let's say a 1990 $100 bill; maybe I can sell that for $110 or $115. So let's just say I get it and it doesn't sell. Well, guess what? I didn't lose any money, because the worst-case scenario is I just go back to the bank with that $100, I deposit it for something else.

So you never lose money when you're doing this. The worst-case scenario is that you break even—that's the worst-case scenario. But I would be able to make a few hundred dollars in a weekend just by going to a bank, getting every single old bill they had, putting it up on eBay, selling it, making a quick profit, and doing the same thing the next week.

This was a really fun side hobby when I was like 16, 17, 18 years old, making a few hundred bucks. You know, obviously, you can only do this for so long before you end up running out of banks or running out of money, and it's—you’ve got to wait some time for money to come in. But if you're someone who has the time, who has the interest in paper currency, and who wants to go and do this, there's really no risks in doing this. You can easily make a few hundred bucks, sometimes in a weekend, just by doing this.

And it's super fun! Again, if you want to see a dedicated video, just do this. I'm more than happy to do it—just comment down below if you have any interest in this, and I will make a video on it. But the reality is this is just one example of thousands of things that you can flip. The sky's the limit to what you could buy and resell for a profit.

Even with a quick Google search of how to flip items on Craigslist and eBay, $100 can really set you up to make hundreds or even thousands of dollars in the future by just investing your time. And also, doing this is such a great experience to find the value of something, to learn how to sell something, to learn how to deal with people who want to buy something. It's really just such a great all-around learning experience for you to try with $100.

Okay, so now the fourth best way to invest $100 is in affiliate marketing. This is where you promote someone else's product, and you get paid a commission anytime someone else buys it. So as an example here, in my description, I have some affiliate links to books I recommend. On average, this pays me about $160 a month—literally just for copying and pasting these links in my description. Or I have that Robinhood link in the description where if someone signs up for that, they get a free stock and I get a free stock valued up to $300.

You can get affiliate commissions for just about anything out there, and $100 is more than enough to set yourself up with some sort of camera—something that you can record to make YouTube videos with. It can set you up to make a—it could set you up to buy a website and get that hosted. There are so many different things that you can do with $100 to set yourself up to start in affiliate marketing.

Honestly, you could even just do this for free if you can build up a large enough following on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook by just getting a niche topic and trying to promote it and get it out there. And honestly, that would just be a great learning experience into understanding social media, understanding how to build an audience, understanding how to sell something, and understanding how to give the audience something that aligns with your values and theirs.

Or even my buddy Odie, who's ODI Productions here on YouTube, makes thousands of dollars a day in affiliate marketing. This is the power of creating a niche audience and then strategically being able to monetize in a way that's win-win for everybody involved. Now, of course, you want to do something that aligns with your audience and your beliefs, and you never want to sell out for a quick profit at the detriment to everyone else around you.

So that's not the point of this. But the point is that if you can build an audience and strategically monetize it in a way that everyone benefits, this could be a great experience, and $100 can be more than enough to get started with this.

Now finally, number five: the best way to invest $100—and this is thinking a little bit outside the box here—but it would be to use that $100 to buy a used lawnmower. Then go to your neighbors, charge them $30 each, and mow their lawns. All of a sudden, within the first day, you can make all of your money back, and then everything after that is profit and gravy.

Then you're going to continue doing this as a side hustle. As you start getting more and more people, you invest maybe in a second lawnmower. All of a sudden, you could charge someone else $15 an hour for that lawnmower, you get paid $30, and all of a sudden you profit the difference.

Then all of a sudden you've got a decent side gig mowing people's lawns, and you can get exercise at the same time. If you want something where you can spend $100 and get a very good return on your money, if it's just about making money, this is one of the best things you can do. A small $100 investment can take you a very long way into even making over $100 a day, depending on how many lawns you can do, just from a $100 investment.

And not only that, you're going to get the experience of starting to grow a small business, starting to meet people, growing clientele, making them happy, and everything else that goes along with making your own business.

So like I said, these are the five best ways that you can invest $100 that will give you a lifelong of experience and knowledge that will carry forward with you for the rest of your life. It's these early experiences that will help you, that will shape you—for when you're making $1,000, for when you're making $10,000, $100,000, and even millions. You can look back at these experiences as the ones that really helped shape you the most.

So as always, you guys, thank you so much for watching! If you enjoy videos like this, if you haven't already hit the like button, just make sure to smash that like button, smash that subscribe button, and then smash that notification bell so YouTube notifies you anytime I upload a video. Also, feel free to add me on Snapchat and Instagram; I post there pretty much daily. So if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to add me there. Finally, I have a private Facebook group in the description for anyone who's interested in real estate, real estate investing, real estate wholesaling, mentoring, coaching—real estate, real estate, real estate, real estate. Add yourself to that! Thank you again for watching, and until next time!