Investing for Absolute Beginners: Start Building Wealth Even If You Know Nothing

Grace Lavender is a personal finance writer and educator who has spent her career making money make sense to people who were never taught it. For eight years she taught high school mathematics in Portland, Oregon, where she kept noticing the same thing: classroom after classroom of students could calculate compound interest perfectly on a quiz, yet no one — including most of the adults in the building — could say what that calculation meant for their own lives. She left teaching in 2016 to write about money in plain language and has been doing it ever since.

Her work focuses on the complete beginner: the person who keeps savings in a checking account, avoids the word "portfolio," and assumes investing is something other, richer people do. She is the author of several personal finance guides and a regular contributor to online publications and newsletters for new investors. Her own first investment was $50 in a mutual fund at age twenty-three, purchased with a paycheck she could barely spare — which is why she believes small starts and boring strategies beat brilliant ones every time. She teaches free investing basics workshops at public libraries, writes a popular newsletter for first-time investors, and lives in Portland with her partner and two extremely opinionated cats. When she isn't writing about index funds, she is hiking, baking bread, or explaining to her cats that no, they cannot have any.