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Investing a SMALL amount of money/Starting a "business"?

7

7254278

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Apr 11, 2004
2,365
0
NYC
Hey all,

Let me start off by saying I know nothing about investing money or starting a small business, nor do I have a product. This is simply a post to educate myself on possibilities as I am very ignorant on this subject.

I just came into a small amount of money. $500 give or take a bit. I have no use for this money so I want to experiment a bit now that I am young and maybe get some educational value out of it and maybe make a small profit. What if anything would you invest this money in? Are stocks an option? I also toyed with the idea of starting a small ebay business, but I dont have a real product. I was kinda playing with the idea of buying broken ipods and maybe replacing parts and reselling them etc. But I am not really sure on anything, nor would I really know how to go about it in the business sense(is it profitable, ETC). I guess I'm kinda asking if you had a sum of around $500 dollars what would you invest it in or do with it, apart from spending it or just saving it? What would you do to attempt to turn these $500 into more profit? I am aware I am very limited and I might end up failing but as I am new in the business world I guess even if I fail, I will take it as a learning experience. . . I just wanna see what my options are. Any ideas to help out a newbie trying to learn a little bit in the business world?
 
well i started buying and selling clamshells 2 years ago. I just started by finding good deals (and sniping) on ebay and then reselling them on ebay, i would find a better time and day to list them. I then started to find clamshells that needed repair, then i would buy them fix them and resell them. it wasn't until i found the oppurtunity of a lifetime that i really started doing this. I bought 366 graphites for 75 each, but they all had airport cards in them, i made about a grand out of a couple of hundred. and from there i have just been trying to buy up lots of ibooks in need of repair. So basically what i'm saying is that if you don't need the cash and want to try something new i'd go for the ipod thing, that is what i was thinking of doing next so you may have some competition soon ;) trust me, if you enjoy doing it and can make a few extra dollars then it's well worth the time. just my 2 cents, probably not worth anything though.
 
Hmmmm, wow, sure sounds like you've been doing alright for yourself. . . Im gonna do a little more research before I do anything though, but thanks for the opinion.
 
I may be wrong but i just don't thank that the return on a CD is really worth it. I looked into it awhile back and remember that it paid very little to have it tied up for a long time.
 
da2005pizimp said:
no problem, i just know that you have to have alot of money for stocks or anything like that.
Click to expand...

Actually you can open a brokerage account with $500. With $9.99 per trade costs, you could actually invest in the stock market. However, trading in individual stocks is risky.

But it might be better to start with mutual funds. Here's a list of mutual funds with a $500 initial investment.
 
wordmunger said:
Actually you can open a brokerage account with $500. With $9.99 per trade costs, you could actually invest in the stock market. However, trading in individual stocks is risky.

But it might be better to start with mutual funds. Here's a list of mutual funds with a $500 initial investment.
Click to expand...

One thing to watch out for on mutual funds are all the fees. They can really eat into your profits. I would check out Fortune magazine to see their recommendations; they have good advice on low-cost funds and rankings of which funds have performed the best historically.
 
Profit comes with opportunities. Opportunities come with passions. Find a domain where you will likely invest your time and efforts first and you'll no need 500$ to make profit.

Forget trading if you don't have more than 10000$.
 
The only advice I can provide is that starting a business stakes a lot of things and doing is just to learn may not be the best reason. Consider how this may affect potential customers if you close up shop because you're done with it.

Starting a business typically takes money, hardwork and motivation. Back when I was in college, I lept hearing that the single reason for small businesses to fail is being under-capitalized. To that end, that 500 dollars may be inadequate. Also if you don't have a product or a desire you may not have the motivation to stick with it during the hard times.
 
The best way to learn business is to do it. If you want to learn, it's best to do so early too.

However, if you do have a product eventually, it'd cost a lot more than $500 to get up and running.

If you want to invest, Apple stock is very profitale at the moment, but you would need to wait for it to go down before you can profit from it, which might not happen for some time.

EDIT: Oops, just realised the age of the thread!
 
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