Over 40? How To Make Money In The Stock Market As A BEGINNER in 2027

So, if you're over 40, and you're trying to figure out how to invest and make money in the stock market as a complete beginner, but you don't know what accounts to open up, you don't know what strategies to use, then this is going to be the perfect video for you. I'm going to give you 100% clarity on how you can start as a complete beginner. I'm going to show you step-by-step on what you can do in your brokerage, and how you can use these four strategies to generate monthly or quarterly income. Now, of course, if you haven't done so already, you can download all my study guides, like the one that I'm showing here down below. Everything is free within the $1 million road map. So, step number one, you want to essentially plan your accounts. So, there are five main accounts that I would look at first, and you want to do it in this specific order. Otherwise, you might run into some issues later on. Maybe you might pay a little bit more higher taxes. But, this is generally the best way to save the most on taxes. The first is you want to, of course, for responsibility's sake, you want to make sure that you open an account that gives you some sort of higher interest. This can include maybe could be a high-yield savings account, or money market fund, or in T-bills or CDs, okay? The next account is going to be some sort of employer 401k. So, this is generally the easiest way to grow your wealth, where if your 401k provider, your job, gives you some sort of percent match, where maybe if you put in $1,000, they also give you another $1,000, meaning that you just got a 100% ROI. You now have $2,000. You just got a free $1,000, right? So, if this is something that you have, you want to take advantage of it, because again, it's free money. The third account is going to be something like an IRA, or an individual retirement account. So, this could be either a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA. But, for the majority of you watching this, most likely, you qualify for a Roth IRA. And if you do, great, because this is a tax-advantaged account. Right now, for 2026, you can contribute up to $7,500 if you're under 50 or up to $8,600 if you're 50 years old and older. The next account, the fourth account, is going to be some sort of HSA. And this is something that not everyone is going to be qualified to open up. You need to have an HDHP or a high deductible health plan. I made a video about this a couple of weeks ago, so you can check it out. And the fifth account, this is one of my favorite accounts, too. This is the taxable brokerage account where you can have unlimited There is no income limit or anything like that. So, generally, like again, what I said before, you want to make sure that you open up these accounts in this specific order here. Step number two, if you want to, of course, get moving, you want to start growing your money, start generating that income, you have to take baby steps. You need to first choose your brokerage. I've talked about this many times already. The top three brokerages that I really like are Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard. I personally use Fidelity and Schwab, but again, you can choose whatever it is that you're comfortable with. I even put all of the customer service numbers here and the links URLs, so this way it's very easy for you to just click on them, okay? Third step is you want to then open up your accounts, right? So, how do you actually do this? Cuz I know a lot of you keep asking me like, how do I do this on the actual website? So, I'm going to use Fidelity because that's what I personally use. So, once you go on to fidelity.com, you're going to click on this button where it says open an account. When you click on that, you're going to see a menu of options. What types of all the types of brokerage accounts that you can open up. So, you click on the one that you need to open up as your next step, just like with the list that I already told you here, okay? Once you have that, it's going to take you to a place where it's going to ask you, "Hey, do you already have an account with us in Fidelity or Schwab?" You can just click on no if you're starting off brand new, and that's totally okay if you're a big brand new beginner. And then it's going to ask you, "Is this account for you or for someone else?" Just say it's for you because we want to keep things easy. And then it's going to ask you to fill out this form. It'll take 5-10 minutes. I promise you it's very, very easy to do. It's going to ask you for your first name, social security number, your birthday, country of citizenship, mobile number, email, so on and so forth. They just want to make sure that you are an actual human being. After you click on next, you are approved for your accounts. Usually it takes just a couple minutes, maybe a couple of hours, or maybe one or two days depending if it's the weekend or if there's something wrong with your accounts, your information. But essentially, you should be approved right away. Step number four, this is where you need to then deposit money. In my other videos, I talked about how to calculate your freedom number, your FIRE. So this way you understand what number you need to get to, and then you can work backwards from that and figure out, okay, I need to contribute $500 or $800 or $900 a month to get to my goal number. So I highly recommend you watching the video where I talk about over 40 and how you can get to your retirement goal starting out with like 50 or $100,000, okay? That link will be somewhere down below or you can search it up on YouTube. But when you get to step number four and you're depositing money, all you're going to do is go to the dashboard for Fidelity or Schwab or whatever it is, and you're going to look for the button where it says transfer. It's going to have a little dollar sign there. Click on that. Once you're there, you're going to click on EFT to or from a bank. And then you're going to go under the section where it says from, just click on the button where it says add a bank or recipients. And then you're going to choose EFT. This is the easiest way for most beginners to connect their bank account, just EFT, very, very easy. And then, who do you want to send money to? You can just say that you're sending your money to yourself, not anyone else. We're investing for ourselves right now, right? We're pursuing financial independence. And then we're going to click on continue, very, very easy, right? We're going to connect our bank accounts, our checking account, savings account from Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, whatever it is that you use, to your brokerage account, your Roth IRA, whatever it is. It's going to send you like a text message or an email confirmation to make sure that this is actually you trying to connect the accounts. But, it should take around like a minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes to do. Once that is complete, you can then go to the transfer section. And this is what I say all the time in all my videos. You want to make sure that as you are building wealth, that this is a habitual thing not just doing it one time. You're doing it on a recurring basis. So, a lot of my students, I will help them set up a recurring deposit of maybe $500 a month, or $1,000 a month, or $200 a month, right? If you're just starting low, and that's totally okay. So, you generally want to choose recurring, and then you're going to see which day of the month you want to contribute money in. Okay? So, for this example, let's just say it's $500, and I type in $500 here. Step number five. So, you cannot just put money into your accounts and just leave it as it is and think it's going to grow. I made this mistake, a lot of my community members made this mistake, so I'm teaching them, "Hey, you actually have to use your money and buy some sort of asset, either some stocks, or some sort of money market fund, or some sort of ETF, mutual fund, whatever it is that you choose." Remember, none of this is financial advice. Your goal here is to choose what you want to do for your money. My goal here is to educate, but in the end, you are in the driver's seat. So, at the age of 40 right now, let's be honest, like I'm currently 39 at the time of this recording. This is not the time to yolo our money, to put into anything speculative where we may lose like half of our savings. I've met a lot of people, I worked with a lot of people where they lost a lot of their money already, so this is not the age to do so, because we have a lot of family members that we want to take care of, maybe our parents or our kids. So, the things that I generally want to avoid for myself at this age is we don't want to choose any individual companies that we don't fully understand. Invest in any penny stocks, meme stocks like GameStop or AMC. Invest in any initial public offerings. I know that it sounds very tempting, okay? But don't do that. And then, of course, any speculative cryptocurrencies that we don't really understand. Because right now, we just want to diversify into just low-cost, broad-based index funds. So, instead of just choosing one company, one stock, and we are choosing maybe 500 or 1,000 or 5,000 companies all at once. We're We're putting our eggs in multiple baskets, not just in one basket. Hopefully, that makes sense. All right. So, how do we actually do this? What are some stocks or ETFs that we can choose? So, this is my portfolio allocation three ETF strategy here. So, what you can do is you can choose one, two, or three ETFs. I like to keep things simple. There are a lot of people that I work with, my coaches where we work with. A lot of people have like 10 ETFs or 30 ETFs, and they're just so confused. But really, you just need like one, two, three, maybe at most five, if you have some sort of different purpose for all of them. But I would say three is kind of like the nice round number here. So, generally, if you're just starting off as a brand new beginner, you can look into something like a stable backbone ETF. So, we're going to focus our attention on this first column here. So, generally, you want to choose an ETF that is upward trending in the 1, 5, and 10-year period. You want to make sure that the performance is between 7 to 12%. Anything lower, that means that it's underperforming against the standard benchmark of the S&P 500, right? You want to choose something that has a low expense ratio. My whole goal here is to save you money. I don't want you to be charged these high fees from these money managers that make you pay 1 or 2% a year, which can equate to over 100, 200, 300,000 dollars over the course of your investing lifetime, right? So, let's save some money here. So, this way you can reinvest that money back into your portfolio. And we generally want to look for some sort of dividend yield if you're into that between 0.5 or even 4%, okay? And of course, like what I've said before, we want to make sure that the actual companies within these ETFs, these back save stocks, don't hold any risky assets like penny stocks, meme stocks, IPOs, Korean just Korean entertainment stocks, or like dog company stocks. There are these themes ETFs. I would stay away from those, okay? So, what are some actual examples? Again, this isn't financial advice, but you can choose whatever you want. I have some examples listed here. There's like SPY, SPYM, VOO is a very popular one, VTI, VT if you want to invest more broadly. If you want to invest into the international stocks outside of the US, you can choose VXUS or even something like SCHB. Of course, there are these other different types of ETFs here like tech and growth and dividend income focused ones. And I put all the examples of the ones that are very popular among my community members here, too. So, you can take a screenshot of this or you can just download the study guide later on today. All right, so once you are, you know, you have clarity on what stocks or what ETFs you want to diversify into, there are two calculators that you want to use. So, this way you can kind of see what your projected portfolio is going to be in the next say 10, 15, 20 years or so. If you're around 40 years old, you probably have a good 20 to 25 or 30 years of runway that you want to invest for because for me even like I probably want to even invest way longer than that all the way until like 80, 90, or whatever 100 years or so, right? So, I am going to look at this compound interest calculator here. You can click on this. It links to all my to my sheet here. I'm going to go to Let's go to a very popular one. This is called compound interest calculator on investor.gov. So, what you can do is if you are someone in your 40s, statistically just by survey stats from Fidelity and all of these other brokerages, they say that if you're at the age of 40, you generally have around like a hundred thousand or like maybe a hundred fifty or two hundred thousand dollars already invested you may be in your Roth or 401k. So, you're probably not starting off at zero dollars. So, we'll just say that your initial investment just using averages is a hundred thousand dollars and we'll say that your monthly contribution is going to be let's say twenty dollars a day, which equates to around six hundred dollars or let's just do six twenty-five, okay? Because six twenty-five times twelve is going to be seven thousand five hundred dollars, which is the maximum amount that you can invest or contribute in a Roth IRA. So, I'll do six twenty-five per month and in length of time in years, let's just say it's twenty-five years, okay? I'm thirty-nine years old. I want to invest for the next twenty-five years. Estimated interest rate, we know that the S&P 500 or the stock market in general has given us anywhere between seven to twelve percent a year over several decades or so. In the last couple of years it has been a little bit more. It's been skewed to maybe like thirteen, fourteen, fifteen percent, but let's just keep it a conservative nice round number of ten percent. And then we're going to say our interest rate variance range is going to be zero just to kind of keep the math very easy. I'm going to click on calculate. So, where with what I'm starting at right now, a hundred thousand dollars and just maxing out my Roth IRA for the next several years, right? I am able to have around one point eight million dollars by the time I retire, okay? So, you can play around with these numbers here to see how much money that you need for your freedom number, for your FIRE goal, or if financial independence retire early, and see how much money you need to contribute on a monthly basis and just work backwards from there. I'll leave all the links, all the calculators here so you can click on it. But really, if you go to this second calculator, the net worth of FI calculator, I've talked about this many times. I know some of you are very fixated on the dollar amount, but some of you may gravitate towards how much or what percentage of my paycheck should I invest? Because maybe that is a more important number to you. So, for example, if your annual income, let's just say it's $70,000 on average okay? And your current annual savings is $0. I know this sounds silly, but if you hit crunch the numbers, I know this is a very silly thing to say, but if you save nothing at all, so I'm going to say your current Oh, your current portfolio value is zero. So, if you save nothing at all, you can never retire. You can retire in infinity years. And this is something that I tell all my young individuals, all my young investors, all my previous students. I used to be a public school teacher, so a lot of them are now like 25 years old, 23 years old, right? 18 years old. And I tell them, you need to make sure that you put away a little bit of your paycheck every single month. Otherwise, you're going to have to work forever, and that's not what you want. You need to figure out a way how to get to financial freedom, right? So, if you save 0%, invest 0%, that's what's going to happen, right? It makes sense. But if you save and invest, say 10%, right? And let's just say again, let's say that you're starting off at $100,000, all right? Then, cool. How many years will it take for you to retire? Oh, okay, around like 23.8 years, okay? Roughly, okay? This is just a rough ballpark. You can factor in inflation and everything like that uh later on, too. But if you save and invest, say 20% of your paycheck every year, okay, this shrinks down to around 20 years, okay? If you save and invest, say 50% of your paycheck, okay? That means you can retire in around 10.5 years. And this is really how a lot of people are able to hit their freedom number, retire much, much earlier than the standard age of, say, 70, 65, or 60 years old, right? So, this is how they were doing it. They're investing and letting their money work for them, which is such an important lesson that everyone needs to learn, right? We need to have this financial literacy here. So, once we re- figure out our actual numbers here, you go to these two calculators that I linked here. The sixth step here is, well, now we want to figure out how to actually make money from the stock market. So, there are different variables. It depends on where you are in the x-axis, where you are in the timeline. But, let's just say that you only want to touch your money later on and you want to start collecting, withdrawing money from your portfolio, that's totally okay. So, there are four different options on how you can make money in the stock market. Option number one, you can use this thing called the 4% withdrawal rule from your asset appreciation. So, just like what I shared here, right? If you were to If you're starting young and even if you start off with $0 and you're just putting in, say, $500 a month, right? And if you invest for the next 40 years, just $500 a month, then if you hit calculate here, it's very easy for you to get to what? $2.6 million as long as you're just consistently investing, right? And even if you start off with just You're not investing $500 a month, let's just say $200 a month. Maybe that's more attainable. See, you can become a millionaire in the next 40 years just by doing that, right? Where if you take a look at the math, you only put in $96,000 of your own money. The rest, the extra $1 million very close to $1 million, that's all free money due to the compound growth. So, you can let that sink in a little bit. So, let's just say that we're going to keep things nice and round. By retirement, you hit that $1 million mark. So, once you hit $1 million and you say, "Okay, I'm going to start withdrawing from it." I can take out around 4%. Now, just like what I said before, the average stock market return is around 10%. So, what is essentially happening from a mathematical perspective is you're taking out 4% while letting your portfolio grow the rest of the 6%, right? Because 4 + 6 is 10, 10%. So, once you hit $1 million, that means that you can withdraw up to 4% and let your other the rest of your portfolio grow over time. This means that on that year that you're taking out your money, you're able to collect around $40,000. That's pretty good, right? On top of Social Security, on top of the other income streams that you potentially will have in the future. But, the magical part is this. As you continue to let your portfolio grow over time, well, guess what? Majority of your portfolio, the 96% of it, right? 100% minus four, 96% of it is still growing. So, it goes from a million dollars and it grows to a million 56,000 dollars. Which means that when you withdraw 4% from that amount the following year, well, you now basically just gave yourself a pay raise. You can now withdraw up to $44,000 using the 4% rule. And if you continue to do that, you let your money grow over time, your money grows to what? $1.1 million now. The next time when you would withdraw your money, what was 4% of this larger money? Now, it's around $46,000. And you can see that as time passes, your portfolio keeps growing and the income that you can generate from it from the 4% also continues to grow. And all of this is just free money just from the compound growth. This is why again, this is so important why I teach financial literacy, why it's so important to invest. And that yes, it's important to work for our money in the beginning. Everyone has to. I used to be a public school teacher. I used to tutor. I used to have a minimum wage job, too, right? But, later on we shift our mindset from working for our money to letting our money work for us. Okay? Hopefully, that makes sense. So, if you just zoom into the future, you can see that all the way all until year 20, your portfolio keeps growing at an automatic rate to around $2.93 million and your annual income from your portfolio that you didn't even have to go to work for is around $123,000, right? So, again, let your money work for you. You want to make sure that at this age right now, you're around 40 years old, we got to start putting our money into some sort of vehicle that's going to grow over time because you have the biggest risk right now, inflationary risk, where if you just leave your money in a low-interest account like Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, you're basically just getting pennies or maybe like a dollar or two every single year. Okay, so here's option number two. If you are someone who maybe, I don't know, you go into like hyper sleep mode, okay, and you don't even touch your portfolio and it continues to grow. This is something that a lot of people will do, too. They don't even touch their portfolio, they don't even sell anything, they don't even do the 4% rule. You can just collect dividends, right? So, going back to my chart here, if you are someone who wants to be more dividend income focused, okay, well, there are a lot of dividend yields, dividend-paying ETFs, where they can yield between two to four, sometimes even 5%, right, depending on what the ETF is. So, if that's the case, well, if you have a $1 million portfolio and you do nothing at all, you basically will get dividend payouts every quarter or so, and if the dividend yield is around 3% annually, your dividend payout is going to be around $30,000. That's money that you don't even have to do, you just sit and your Fidelity account, your brokerage account will just pay you $30,000 every single year. Split it up into four, right, cuz they're usually, not always, paid quarterly. Now, if you think about it in terms of a real estate perspective, well, just like what I showed here before, your portfolio amount is going to continue to grow over time. So, it's not going to stay at $1 million. It's going to go up in price, just like a home, where you buy a home for maybe a million dollars and you collect around $30,000 of rental income a year. But, you know that in the real estate market, your home is going to appreciate over time. So, it'll probably go up to, say, $3 million in the future. You might think that's silly, but if you look at the historical growth of the stock market and even with real estate, yeah, prices always increase over time because of inflation, right? And prices of goods and services always increase. And if we keep that same 3% yield, well, you know what? You're now paid $90,000 of dividends per year, up from this $30,000. And again, this is why so many rich people become even more rich later on. It's because what? They invest, right? They know the importance of putting a small amount of their paycheck, 10%, 5%, 20% into their savings accounts, into their emergency fund, into their Roth IRA. They are planning for the future. And if you're 40 years old right now, this is and you haven't gotten started with investing, now is the time to start, okay? Now, here is option number three. Option number three is also a a little bit more nuanced here, okay? It's a little bit more technical, but what you can do is because you have this larger portfolio, you can actually collect premiums from covered calls and cash secured puts. So, what that means is, from a nutshell, because you have a lot of shares, right? Every time you have a multiple, you collect 100 shares, you basically built a little small apartment, which you can then rent out, okay? Collect this premium income by selling these covered calls. I'm just using very broad analogies here, but if you want to take a deeper dive into how to sell covered calls, I'll show you how to do that in a little bit. But essentially, every time you build up your portfolio so it has multiples of 100 shares, 200 shares, 300 shares, 400 shares, so on and so forth, you basically built this little apartment that can generate some income for you. Okay, so you can see what strategies that you want to do. I don't want to tell you what to do, but I'm just laying it all out there for you. So, as an example, if you have like say one home or one apartment, you're able to collect $300 a month. Well, if you think about it, as you build your portfolio, just like what I showed you with a compound interest calculator, let's say that you have 10 homes. That means that you're able to collect $3,000 a month. And in the stock market world, if you were to sell cover calls or collect this premium, so if you are able to do this with one contract, that's around $200 a month. 10 contracts, right? We're scaling upwards, maybe not now, but later in the future, it becomes $2,000 a month. And then 30 contracts, that's around $6,000 a month. And this is something that I did, I do right now, a lot of my community members do. This is all very normal, you know, we just invest, sell cover calls, we collect dividends, and sometimes if we want to make a bigger purchase, maybe buy a car or go on vacation, some of my community members will sell off a percentage of their portfolio, and then they use that to reallocate into something else, right? So, this is just a normal thing that all wealthy people do. So, I'm trying to make it normalized for you, too. So, here is option number four. If you are someone who is sitting on a larger sum of cash, well, the easiest thing that you can do, the lowest hanging fruit that you can do, is move your money away from your 0.01% account, and move it into, like what I said before, into something like a money market fund, at least, where you get 2 to 5%. I know this isn't life-changing or anything, uh where the stock market gives you around like 10, 11, 12% a year, but the money market funds are just easily able to pay you interest on a monthly basis. So, what are these money market funds? Again, you just leave your money as cash in your accounts, or you can like buy some sort of money market fund. Some examples include SPAXX, SWVXX, and VMFXX, depending on if you use Fidelity, Schwab, or Vanguard, okay? So, if you want to keep your cash liquid, that's totally fine, then you can at least just put it into a money market fund, where you're still making some sort of money, okay? You're still making that interest paycheck every month or so. A lot of our community members, they move their money from Chase to a money market fund. They went from making like a dollar to now $500 a month. Okay. >> [laughter] >> I know that it's not life-changing, but if it were me, I would choose a $500 rather than the one or two dollars here. Okay, it makes a lot of sense here. All right, so if you are someone who is sitting at around $100,000 of cash, and if you have a interest say interest yield of say 3% and that's what the Federal Reserve dictates, then your annual interest payout is around $3,000. Okay, it's way better than the couple of dollars that you get from Chase, Wells Fargo, or Bank of America. So, if you were paying very close attention to every strategy that I was talking about here, all the four strategies, this is essentially the paid strategy, which is what I use, all of my community members use. So, paid stands for premiums from selling covered calls and cash-secured puts. A stands for the asset appreciation using the 4% rule or 3% rule, whatever it is that you want to withdraw. I is from interest, and then D is from dividends. And when you mend all four of these strategies together, it comes out to be really the paid strategy. And this is what I teach within my community and how I help a lot of 40-year-olds and above they how to, you know, catch up and how to generate that short-term income. Because I know that there are a lot of people who, yes, they want to grow their wealth for the long term, but they don't necessarily want to wait 10, 15, 20 years or so. They want to use a small percentage of that to generate short-term income. They want the money now, which is totally okay, right? You can choose the chocolate cake and the strawberry cake too. Have them both. Why not, okay? So, you don't have to have this this or that kind of mindset. But, if you are someone who wants to get started with investing, you want to, you know, get on it as quickly as possible. Remember, you actually have the biggest risk, especially for those of you who have a larger sum of money, because you have inflationary risk. And this is where I help individuals catch up within 5 days. So this is one of my students, Tina. Tina says, "My husband and I thought it was too late for us to start, especially with not knowing anything about investing. And after using Steve's road map, which you can download below, I decided to work with him and the coaches and realized that I couldn't save my money anymore. I had to invest it. I'm proud to say that we're collecting monthly passive income and on our way to a $5.2 million portfolio." Like I'm so proud of Tina and her husband. They got started and it was very very easy for her just by putting their money into the correct vehicles instead of just leaving their money in a regular checking accounts. And right now they're making around, I think, six or $700 of dividends every month. And this is going to increase over time just like what I shared with you. And this is from Jerome. I asked him the same question, like what are you proud of? And he said, "I took the leap when I started following Steve a couple years ago and didn't know anything about the stock market. I'm now a confident investor with over $500,000 invested. I'm proud to say that I'm projected to have at least $4.7 million of a portfolio by retirement. So thank you, Steve, and your fantastic team of coaches." So if you are someone who wants to catch up right away, uh you can download my $1 million road map. It's 100% free. Or if you just need someone to kind of talk to, maybe you want to talk to me or one of my team members, you can book a strategy call with us. I'll ask you We'll ask you a couple questions on where you are financially, what's your freedom number that you want to get to, and then we'll give you some actionable steps, like two to five actionable steps that you can take so that you are on your way to that number. Okay? And if you qualify for our coaching program, then we might ask you to invite you to join our accelerator program where we can help you get to your goals faster. So this way you don't have to wait another year, 5 years, 10 years to get started, right? We want to move fast. Okay? But either way, if you decide to join or not, we'll still give you two to five actionable steps. I'll give you all of my resources. Everything is going to be there for you. So this way you can jump start your investing journey. Okay? So if you want to apply, all the links are down below. If you have any questions at all, please let me know down below. I'm going to be taking some time this week to answer your questions, and hopefully this video helped, and I will see you in the next one.