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Beginner investing · Start with under $500

Stop losing money to confusion.

Troy A. York HQ teaches beginner investing for people starting with under $500. No jargon, no hype.

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Three steps from zero to your first invested dollar.

This is the on-ramp for a total beginner. Each step is short, and none of them asks you to be rich first.

1

Learn the foundations

What a stock, an ETF and an index fund actually are, in plain words, and why the difference matters more than any tip.

2

Open your first account

Brokerage setup, walked through screen by screen: which account to open first, what the fees mean, and what to ignore.

3

Put your first $500 to work

A small-account strategy you can explain to a friend: what to buy, in what order, and what to leave alone.

Topics

Five things worth understanding before you buy anything.

Everything published here lives under one of these. On day one it is a table of contents; as posts and videos land, each card fills in.

Pillar 1

Foundations

What $500 becomes at 20 versus 30 versus 40. Why a savings account quietly loses money. Roth IRA, brokerage, 401(k): which one you open first.

Posts land here as they publish.

Pillar 2

Brokerage Setup

Opening your first account, screen-recorded step by step. Fractional shares, market versus limit orders, and the five fees beginners never see coming.

Posts land here as they publish.

Pillar 3

Small-Account Strategies

Index funds explained like you're five. Dollar-cost averaging, the laziest strategy that beats most traders. Honest dividend math on $500.

Posts land here as they publish.

Pillar 4

Mistakes to Avoid

Why day trading with $500 is a donation. The penny-stock trap. What happened to everyone who panic-sold, and the red flags when someone is selling you something.

Posts land here as they publish.

Pillar 5

Scenarios & Myth-Busting

$500 and $8k of card debt: what comes first. What $100 a month becomes over 30 years. Starting at 22 versus 32, with the real gap, and whether crypto counts as investing.

Posts land here as they publish.

Free download

The Under-$500 Starter Checklist

One page. The exact order of moves for a first-time investor, so you never sit there wondering what comes next.

  • Which account to open first, and the one question that decides it
  • The three things to check before you buy anything
  • A simple first-$500 split you can explain to a friend
  • The mistakes that cost beginners the most, and how to sidestep each one

I'm Troy. I work in finance and I build things. I started this because the people who asked me where to begin were getting hype or homework, and nothing in between: a calm answer to one question at a time, with the math shown. The full story →

Troy A. York
I also build things

Fitz

A job search engine ranked by your résumé. Drop in a résumé and Fitz reads it with plain rules, no AI and nothing stored, then ranks tens of thousands of live roles by how well each one fits you. Built during my own search, after a layoff.

Why it matters here

Shipping real software is the credential.

The same habit runs through everything on this site: source the claim, show the assumptions, and explain the trade-off instead of reciting a script. Fitz, the playbook behind it and the models I keep for myself all came out of that habit.

See the project timeline →