We bought our house almost two years ago and started saving for a home deposit or down payment a couple of years before that.

Our savings progress started out quite slow, as I wasn’t making nearly as much money at the time as I was when we bought the house, but by the time we went to buy our house we had a substantial chunk of money saved up.

We worked really hard to amass a down payment. Here are a few things that we did that may work for you:

Worked a Side Hustle

Instead of cutting all of our expenses down to nill, and struggling through a couple of years of extreme frugality to save up more money, I decided to take on some extra work.

I picked up a writing gig, began monetizing a blog that I ran and even started babysitting. This helped us save up a lot of money, as all of the extra cash I earned from these side hustles went straight into our high interest savings accounts.

Make Passive Income On Your Savings

We put all of our home deposit savings into a high interest savings account and in mutual funds in our TFSAs. This helped us earn interest on the money that was in there, which compounded and paid us even more.

Assuming you can’t save up for a down payment in a short period of time, investing the money for a couple of years is a great way to make extra on what you’ve already saved. It’s a way of making your money work harder for you.

Make Sure You Know How Much You Need

To reach a goal, you need to know what that goal is. While it may seem too far off to know, it’s a good idea to look into what type of home you want to buy prior to setting your home deposit goal.

This will help put things into perspective, and also give you an idea of what percentage you want to put down.

You can put anywhere from 5% down up to 100% down, and of course the more you put down the better position you’ll be in.

Some mortgaging companies will help you put less down, like Homestart low deposit home loans. Be careful with putting too little down, though, as you often have to pay PMI in North America which can be a hefty sum.

Down payments don’t have to be too difficult to save for, you just have to know what you are doing.

Online investing tools have made it faster, easier, and cheaper to buy investing products, and have opened up the world of investing to a whole new group of people.

These tools are popular — 73 percent of investors around the world use them. But if you’ve never used online investing tools before, you shouldn’t just rush to your computer and open a brokerage account without understanding the basics of how online investing works.

There are different types of online investing accounts, like IRAs or custodial accounts for children. You’ll need to know what you’re investing for, and you’ll need to know what kinds of investment products you’re interested in purchasing. When you invest online, you’ll be the one in charge — you’ll be the one making all the decisions about what to buy and sell and when to buy and sell it. If you think you can handle the responsibility, you’ll need to know where to find a reputable online brokerage, how to find stock information, how to place orders, and what to do if you have a complaint.

Find a Good Online Brokerage

Online brokerages are just like any other type of business — some are trustworthy and dependable, while others are less so. Naturally, you want to choose a brokerage of the reputable stripe. But where do you look for such a brokerage, especially if you’ve never invested online before?

Luckily, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) offers a free tool called BrokerCheck that can tell you if the brokerage you’re considering is legit. BrokerCheck can give you information about brokerages and investment advisor firms, and can also help you find online background reports and other resources for investors. If you don’t even know where to find brokers to run through BrokerCheck, try asking friends who have invested online, or simply search “online brokerages.”
Once you find a brokerage, open an account and put in some money. You don’t need much, and many brokerages allow you to open an account with no minimum deposit. Keep putting money in your brokerage account regularly so you can continue to grow your wealth.

Find Stock Information and Choose Investments

Once you’ve found a brokerage and opened an account, it’s time to start looking at stocks. You don’t have to start buying and selling right away; in fact, if you’re new to investing, you should practice first. Go to the Investor Simulator Center to practice conducting online trades. Use paperTrade to improve your investing strategies. If you run into terms you don’t understand — and you probably will — look them up on Investopedia.
To find stock information about companies that interest you, look up their stock symbols on Google or another search engine, or use the Wolfram Alpha search engine, which is specific to stock information.

Placing Stock Orders in an Online Brokerage Account

If you’ve never placed stock orders in an online brokerage account before, there are a few things you need to know. For example, your orders may not always go through right away; things like faulty equipment or heavy Internet traffic can delay your orders. There’s no law that says an order has to be executed within a certain time frame. Other important things to know include:

• You should make sure an order is cancelled before you place another order. If your order was already placed, it might have gone through anyway.
• You should always verify that your order didn’t go through before trying to place it again. Many people accidentally buy more stock than they wanted or more than they can afford.
• When you trade on margin, the brokerage can sell the stock without telling you. They’ll usually do this if the market tanks.
• If you’re trading in a cash account, you have to pay for any stocks you buy before you can sell them again. Your brokerage could freeze your account if you try to buy stock you can’t afford and then sell it again in order to pay for it, a practice called “freeriding.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) maintains a number of helpful investing tips on its website.

Know How to Make a Complaint

If you feel you have to file a complaint against your brokerage, do it as soon as possible, since you only have a limited amount of time to file such complaints. Call and ask for an explanation of the problem. If you don’t get one, or you’re not satisfied with the one you do get, write to the firm’s compliance office explaining the problem and what you want done about it. Request a written response within 30 days. If that doesn’t work, contact the SEC and forward copies of your complaint and any correspondence you may have exchanged with the firm.

Online investing is an easy and fast way to expand your portfolio and increase your wealth. With a little practice using online tools, you can soon learn to research your own investments and conduct your own trades. Then you can join the growing majority of folks who are taking control of their own financial freedom.

Stereotypes can be a terrible nuisance. People get an idea in their heads and ‘kapow!’ that’s it, stigma, discrimination and all sorts of prejudice come flying out of the box.

My friend Liz who uses a wheelchair and who looks a bit unusual since her surgery knows just how easy it is to be on the wrong side of a stereotype.

And of course there are other, equally serious stereotypes that I could mention, but that would be a distraction.

What I want to draw attention to is something a bit less heavy. In a nutshell it is that there are some stereotypes that can get in the way of using your leisure time in a manner that is both rewarding and economically responsible. ‘Low cost’ and ‘cheap’ are two words that carry very different connotations, and as we’ve discussed before, there is a terrible stereotype attached to the latter.

I’m going to use the example of 32Red online casino’s to illustrate this (you can find out more about 32Red here). 32Red is an online casino that allows people to play a range of games for real stakes and it offers real cash prizes.

For some people gambling has a bad name. And for some, online gaming gets an equally bad rap. This is certainly true for people who are addicted to gambling or who waste all of their money at casinos and online gaming sites, but like drinking, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

For my friend Liz, who keeps unusual hours sometimes, and who can struggle to get out of the house, 32Red is a lifeline. It provides a sense of escape and excitement that she’d struggle to match in other recreational settings.

The great thing about online gaming for Liz is that she’s the one who decides how much it costs (she plays for pennies) and how much time she’s going to devote to it. She’s not an addict in any way, and nor is she anything other than someone who has found a way to generate a flexible, low cost source of entertainment that feels as though it actually means something. Not long ago she won close to $300.

A lot of people would turn their noses up at the idea of online gaming. They’d see it as a kind of trailer-trash exploitation that sucks up cash and is just the thin end of a dubious moral wedge.

But that’s just one stereotypical view. Liz talks about it in a very different way. Her eyes shine when she starts to talk through her last game of poker or her hunches for the baseball season in a way that I have rarely seen since her accident.

Liz takes a lot more away from 32Red than what is measured in dollars and cents.

And if you were to take the time to talk to her about it you’d find her to be a serious-minded, intelligent woman with a full grasp of the moral, financial and psychological implications of what she is doing, and a very strong belief that she has as much right as anyone else in town to have a bit of fun.

Of course, to get to that point in the conversation, you might have had to put a few stereotypes to one side.