So, money episode 1221, ask Farnoosh all things investing with special guest Liz Young, head of investment strategy at SO5.

You're listening to SOMONEY with award-winning money guru Farnoosh Karabi, each day in a 30-minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's top business minds, authors, influencers, and from Farnoosh herself.

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Welcome to SOMONEY, everybody. Happy Friday. It is Ask Farnoosh Friday, and today we're doing something special. We're focusing entirely on investing.

As you may or may not know, if you follow me on Instagram a while back, I pulled some of your hottest questions about how to invest, if you're self-employed, whether to contribute to a 401k.

You've asked a lot of questions, someone wants to know about memes, stock investing, and lots, lots more.

This is a special episode because it is being produced in partnership with our friends at SOFY. I love SOFY. It's this all-in-one platform where you can save, you can spend, earn, borrow, invest.

And now at SOFY you can buy stocks and ETFs, you can open an automated portfolio, all with no account minimums and zero commission on trades.

Plus, members now have access to upcoming IPOs before they begin trading on an exchange. Can you believe this? This is super cool for retail investors. It's such a game changer.

And SOFY social investing, you can follow other members and see what they're investing in. You can go to SOFY.com, forward slash SOMONEY right now to sign up for a SOFY active investor account, and you can actually win $5,000.

So that's SOFY, so excited for this partnership. With that, helping me answer your questions today is Liz Young. She's SOFY's head of investment strategy where she is responsible for providing economic and market insight.

It's to a variety of audiences. You may have seen her on all of the television, all the networks. Liz is passionate about educating others on investing to help people feel empowered, to take a more active role in their financial futures. Liz Young, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Hi, Furnish. I'm really excited to be here.

We're excited to get into this very important topic. We brush on investing throughout all of the episodes, all of the 1200 episodes. We usually get into investing at some point, but to dedicate an entire episode to this, it's important.

And so we really appreciate having you here. We've got a lot of interesting questions from the audience. I tease a few of the questions up at the top. Before we get into it, Liz, just want to get to know you a little bit better.

And have you share a little bit about first, maybe how you got into investing and what attracted you to this world of finance?

Yeah, you know, it's actually interesting. I have a good story about how I started investing. I was sort of forced into it, but rightfully so.

I majored in finance as well in college. It's always been finance. I liked math. I was one of those nerds that liked math growing up.

But I also wanted to be in business. And to me, that meant if I needed to combine math and business, I wanted to do finance and funny enough early on, I wanted to do corporate finance. And I wanted to be on a CFO route.

And I changed my mind somewhere in my mid 20s as I got more and more interested in the investing side of it, the asset management side of it. And I completely fell in love with the industry.

But the story about how I got started and investing, I was actually a bank teller in college. And I became eligible for the 401k plan.

But I was working only about 10 or 15 hours a week. I wasn't making a lot of money at all. And I thought I needed every single penny of that money for whatever college kids do with their money.

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