In my parent’s generation, saving took more paramount importance over investing.
Investing in itself implies that you have extra income to bet on the stock market, and for my parents, every dollar either went to my education savings, the mortgage, necessities, or the occasional trips back home (to Taiwan).
I, however, grew up in an era where investing became a buzzword. These days, there are far more investments you could make than in the boring old stock market—Bitcoin, NFTs, real estate, angel investing… the list goes on.
In this post, I’m not going to talk about any type of investment that requires you to deposit money into some type of institution or company. More so, I’m going to talk more about the investments I wish I had made or made more of when I had the opportunities to do so.
Here are my five alternatives to investing in stocks.
Disclaimer: I am invested in stocks, but the returns are not significant enough for me to talk about. Because it’s pre-authorized, it’s more of savings account for me. I’ve made more on Bitcoin on a whim (but that was 100% luck/ a gamble).
Books
If it weren’t for books, I wouldn’t be a writer.
The reading habit I’ve cultivated since the third grade has trailed into a ferocious love for the written language—both fictional works and non-fiction.
Most books I read today belong to the latter. In my second year of college, I started reading personal development or business-related books and found the parallels between those two to be significant.
Reading helps you understand yourself and the world around you—it literally can open up your perspective on different things: health, relationships, mindset, money, history, social division…etc
More importantly, the vocabulary you inherently develop from reading adds a more sophisticated touch to your writing—and most people benefit from this in their day-to-day communication in a professional setting.
And the great thing about books is that they range from $15-$30 (on the high end), and these days they can be accessed through Audible or you can even go the old fashion route and borrow it for free at your local library.
That’s truly one of the cheapest investments, and although the returns are sometimes not immediately tangible, it’s a great long-term investment to accumulate knowledge and improve your communication and writing skills.
Courses/Self-Education
Online courses have taken precedence over the past couple of years. Investments in Edtech have increased monumentally, showing that there is increased interest in DIY degrees and the democratization of education.
I think formal education, that is, going to an institution like a college or a university serves well as a type of experience and helps you develop the baby steps of discipline. The continuous action of having to complete wordy essays and exams gets you in a routine of constantly pushing yourself to study, so you don’t absolutely flunk your mid-terms.
Universities utilize more of a carrot/stick mentality. If you study consistently and do well on your grades, you won’t be kicked out or have to spend another $600 to retake a course. That fear of having to spend another semester doing the same thing and paying that amount is enough to motivate people to be disciplined, in some sense (unless you’re really struggling with mental health or adverse circumstances in your environment).
I, however, believe that if you truly wanted to learn something and there was a tangible reason why, those two factors should be enough to push you through to the next milestone.
These days you can browse and learn basically anything you want. If you purely want to learn theory, check out Coursera which has courses that are created by some of the top universities in the world like Harvard and Cambridge. If you want to learn something more practical like fashion design or directing a film, check out Masterclass, where world-class experts walk you through step by step how to learn those skills.
Investing in self-education is one of the greatest investments that I wish I’d partaken in more. Most of the time, you can get certificates that prove you’ve completed a course/test, but I think the benefit of such an endeavor goes beyond a digital piece of paper.
Business
You don’t necessarily need capital to start a business, in fact, most of the time it’s recommended you start with bootstrapping unless you’re developing some type of technology or software. For digital service-based businesses, it’s completely normal for people to start from zero.
For someone like me, who gets unequivocally bored with doing one thing and one job, starting a side hustle or a business is a perfect way to satisfy that itch.
Now, the number one issue is that most people like the idea of a side hustle, but don’t really know what or how to start something.
Luckily, the internet provides several ideas from people who have started successful slide hustles—whether you prefer watching videos or blog posts. You can always refer online for inspiration.
I think the best kind of side hustle, is one that is intuitive to you. Notice what skills you already have and start from there. Maybe you have an eye for luxury fashion, you might want to research how to start a luxury reseller side hustle. That’s just one example.
Travel
Yes, I’m calling traveling an investment. Here’s why.
I found that through my solo trips—I discovered so much about myself, my own capabilities and found more confidence throughout that time.
I swear you connect better with strangers when you’ve traveled, and you never know what opportunities those connections can lead to. I’ve often found myself carefully listening in awe to my friend’s travels to places I’d never been to.
Traveling opens up your worldview and helps you develop greater empathy towards people that have different backgrounds or cultures from you. This skill is increasingly important as well in workplace communication, as more companies are developing a global workforce. And when there’s an opportunity to go abroad, the company is going to select people they think have the type of resilience and intelligence to thrive in a different, cultural setting.
Community
In the acclaimed book, All About Love, by scholar and social justice writer, Bell Hooks, she dedicates a whole section of the book to love in the community.
Her argument pertains to the violence and chaos in the world as a result of a ‘loveless’ society. Love, as we traditionally think of it is interpersonal, but we also have to think about how healthy and tended to our roots are.
The saying, “to know where your roots are”, speaks heavily to what I’m trying to explain here. Your roots are essentially the community that has brought you up. This could look like the supervisors who’ve spent the last two decades guarding the streetlights for the primary school, or the parents of the friends who took care of you when your parents worked during the day.
Giving back and investing in the community can look like many different things, but even indirectly (ex. Helping out with a food drive for low-income folks) spark the same feeling of peace.
Sometimes, giving back is uncomfortable because you learn things about the community you might have not known otherwise. You learn that suffering, also comes with a lot of grace and humaneness.
And the kind thing about giving back to your community is that it can cause a ripple effect. I had people early on in my life invest in me with their time and money, and I hope to do the same for the people that come into my life at some point or another.
Conclusion
When you invest in stocks, all you’re doing is watching and waiting for the numbers to either go up or go down. When you invest in yourself or others, the results aren’t always as tangible, but I think it’s sometimes these non-monetary investments that truly bring the most enrichment to our lives.
With that, I encourage you to find one thing you can invest in today.
Secret Prose 
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