Why should we invest as soon as we can? Ask yourself what do I want in some number of years: A comfortable retirement; Save for a child’s education; Buy a house? There are a myriad of other reasons but ultimately we will need to accumulate a sum of money to meet these goals.
How much will we end up with? To give an example, the stock market average return over the past 30 years is about 12%. If we invest $100 per month in 30 years we would expect to have about $352,991. Not too bad for having invested $36,000. If we invest $500 a month in 30 years this would grow to about $1.765 million. There will be good years (37.2%) and bad years (-36.55) so it is necessary to take a long term view. On the whole, there are more good years than bad years.
There are other investments that we will examine later.