How to Start Investing WITHOUT A Finance Degree
Oct 06, 2023
As-Salaam-Alaikum everyone! Welcome back to Muslim Women Invest.
Today’s topic is an extremely interesting one. We’re going to discuss how one can possibly start investing without a professional degree in finance or ever having studied anything closely related to finance.
The simple answer? You do what I did. Let me explain…
Learn By Example
I have a degree in medicine. I don’t have a professional degree in finance or anything close, yet I've been very successful since I decided to start investing.
One reason for that is that investing was a culture in my family. I saw my grandmother investing. I saw my mom investing. I saw my aunts investing. I saw my father and my uncles discussing investing with my mother and the other women in the house; their opinions were taken with a lot of consideration, and they were the leaders of making investing decisions for our family, especially my mom.
So in my particular family, I did not see a really traditional hard-cut gender line. And because my mother took this role of active investing, I had some strong role models and a practical example to follow when I chose to start investing. I always knew that it is upon the individual, regardless of them being male or female, to start investing.
Learning Through Self-Education
The second thing is that growing up, my parents allowed me to read as much as I wanted. I had a lot of books. That is the number one thing that I spent my time and money on, and that opened my mind to what was possible for me.
So when I started telling people that I was going to start investing, I was able to ignore when people told me I wasn’t qualified enough. They told me so many negative things: “You are not qualified enough. You don't have a degree. You are going to lose all your money. You shouldn't be doing this. You're wasting your time. Who told you that you are clever enough with numbers to do this?”
After this flood of negativity, I stopped talking about it with other people, but I didn’t stop teaching myself to invest.
I knew this was an important skill to learn. I had learned so many things simply by opening a book and reading the instructions on how to do it, so I knew it was possible. Plus, everyone in my family had done the same. None of them had a degree in finance, but they did really well when they decided to start investing.
Because I had such a strong example and had experienced the power of educating oneself, I was able to literally shut out the noise from all the naysayers and just do my own thing.
The number one thing I want you to take away from this is that you do not need a degree to start investing.
Successful people all have three things in common: they are able to educate themselves, they are able to take action, and they don't need permission from other people to do something they know is important.
You do not need a degree. All you need to do is to begin.
I won’t lie to you: it’s going to be messy at first. But you are allowed to stumble as you learn. You are investing for yourself—you are not managing other people's investments. You are not a professional investor. You are not an accountant. This is for yourself, not others.
This is especially true if you come and work with me, because I have seen all the mistakes beginning investors make. I have made all the mistakes on your behalf, and that has not stopped me. It has only taught me how to help others avoid making the same mistakes.
I have not stopped learning. Every day I wake up and I am excited to learn on the job.
It’s not going to look pretty from the outside, but it is going to be worthwhile. The help of Allah is only with the people who try to help themselves.
Some of the Hardest Jobs Have No Degree
There are many things in life that you learn on the job.
For example: when someone becomes a parent, there is no parenting instruction manual. This is one of the hardest jobs there is, and yet, people become parents all the time. Does anyone stand around and ask them about their parenting degree?
In our religion, life is priceless. So if human life is priceless, yet you can create and become responsible for it with no degree, why do you insist on having a degree in finance before you start investing?
There have been people who have gone from making nothing to making a lot of money without degrees. Instead, they learned and processed and adjusted as they went. They had an incredible work ethic. They did not let anyone or anything set them back—they worked for it, and they achieved it. And you can do the same.
WORK WITH MIRAL:
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