While the following content is intended to be educational, it does contain promotional material for Kaldi.

You probably remember the first time you did something that felt very adult and very terrifying in equal measure. Maybe it was filing a tax return or calling the plumber for that leak that is now creating a mini swimming pool for your downstairs neighbour. Buying your first stock has that same energy. It sounds like something other, more sorted people do. But it isn't. Here's how to start, and why Kaldi makes that first step considerably less dramatic.

What actually is a stock?

A stock is a tiny slice of a company. You give them some money, you own a small piece of them, and if they do well, your piece is worth more. If they don't, it's worth less. You can write that on a Post-it note and it will contain roughly the same amount of helpful information as most introductory investing books, which are usually about 300 pages long and have a lighthouse on the cover for some reason.

The financial world has spent decades making this sound like something only certain, special, be-suited people can understand. This is not true. It is also, arguably, quite convenient for the be-suited people.

Where most people come undone in relation to stocks

The anxiety isn't about the stock itself as much as it’s about being wrong. Nobody wants to sink any of their savings into something and watch it disappear, especially when the internet is full of people who seem to have done exactly that, loudly and in great detail. 

The people who lose sleep over investing are usually the ones treating it like a pub quiz final round, going all in on one answer they're not entirely sure about. Buying a diversified index fund (a basket of hundreds of companies at once) is the opposite of that. It's slow, and a little bit boring. It's the financial equivalent of having vitamins every morning and being smug about it ten years later because you got all the right nutrients. 

Here’s what you need to do

Pick a fund. Not a stock. A fund. You are not Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett is barely Warren Buffett at this point. A fund is a big pot of lots of different companies, which means if one of them has a bad Tuesday, the other three hundred are getting on with things. 

You put money in on a schedule and don't look at it every twenty minutes. You just leave it alone. That is the whole strategy. Anyone trying to get you to do something more complicated than that is probably trying to sell you something.

Kaldi keeps things simple (we know, we know, we just said people are trying to sell you things, but hear us out). With Kalid, you pick a fund that matches how much risk you're comfortable with, set up auto-invest and then get on with your life. The money goes in. The money does its thing. You go and buy a coffee.

And that coffee is actually doing something

When you buy that coffee, or the weekly shop, or a new pair of trainers, or anything else you were going to buy anyway, Kaldi rounds up the spare change and drops it right into your savings pot. Buy a coffee for £3.60, Kaldi rounds it up to £4, and 40p goes towards your investments without you having to think about it or feel virtuous about it or tell anyone you did it.

On top of that, if you're shopping with any of Kaldi's 160-plus partner brands  (Amazon, Deliveroo, Airbnb, Starbucks, Costa Coffee that sort of thing),  you get cashback, usually between 1% and 10%, which goes straight into the same pot. 

It all accumulates in your savings pot until it hits £20, at which point Kaldi auto-invests it into your chosen fund. You didn't do anything. You just bought stuff you were going to buy anyway and somewhere in the background, your investments got slightly larger. That's it. That's the sales pitch.

The part everyone worries about and shouldn't

Losing money. That's the fear, right? You've worked hard for it, it's sitting there in your account being reassuringly present, and the idea of watching a number go down because of something that happened in a market you don't fully understand and couldn't influence anyway feels genuinely horrible.

And yes, investments can go down. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying to you, and you should leave whatever room they're in. But the bit nobody tells you, the thing that gets lost between all the terrifying Bloomberg graphics and your uncle's very strong opinions about gold, is that time is doing most of the heavy lifting here. 

The people who lost money in the stock market are mostly the people who panicked, sold everything when it dipped, and then watched it recover without them. They turned a bad month into a permanent loss. Don't be that person.

You are not trying to time anything. You are not day-trading from a laptop in Nero’s. You are putting a small, manageable amount away every month and leaving it alone for years, ideally decades, while compound growth does something extraordinary to it in the background. It is, genuinely, the most boring possible version of investing. Which is exactly why it works.

Right, so …

You've read this far, which means you're probably the kind of person who researches things thoroughly before doing them, which is exactly the right personality type for this. The wrong personality type is the one who puts their entire savings into a cryptocurrency named after a dog because someone in a group chat said it was "going to the moon". You are not that person. You've done the reading.

So download Kaldi, pick a fund with a  risk rating you’re comfortable with, set up auto-invest for whatever amount won't make you anxious, and you’re done. Go about your life. Buy the coffee. Get the Deliveroo. Let the roundups and cashback stack up in the background like a very sensible friend who's been handling your finances while you weren't paying attention.

You will not lose sleep over it. That's the whole point. Now download the Kaldi app. 

Capital is at risk when investing. The value of your investments can go up or down, and you may get back less than you put in. Kaldi doesn’t offer personal financial advice, so if you’re unsure whether investing is right for you, it’s worth speaking to a qualified financial adviser.