The market is intimidating, but not unapproachable.

It’s always a great time to become an investor, even on a casual basis. More money is flowing through the digital space than ever before, so if you know a thing or two about how the market flows and don’t mind occasionally throwing caution to the wind, it can be a fun and potentially profitable venture. That said, the market can seem very intimidating at a glance, which is why numerous myths about investing have sprung up over the years.

For one thing, there’s an assumption that you need to be absolutely loaded with liquid capital in order to become an investor. That’s not quite true; you need to have a lot of money in the bank if you’re a day trader working exclusively with the biggest names on the market, but nobody starts out like that. Even if you only have ten bucks to throw into the void, that’s still enough to buy a handful of shares in most smaller companies. You can also buy fractional shares to get a small slice of bigger pies, or ETFs to get in on multiple stocks at once. It only gets expensive once you’re buying shares by the truckload.

Speaking of truckloads of money, you’ll probably freak out about losing truckloads of money in the event of a market crash. Crashes are scary, for sure, but they’re not the end of the market as we know it. The entire crux of investing as a means of making money is that it can take years for your investments to properly mature, and nobody knows what the face of the market will be in a single year, to say nothing of five to ten. There will be crashes, and you’ll probably lose some value, but unless you’re bordering on destitute, that’s no reason to sell off all of your assets and hide the cash under your mattress. The market will eventually recover. It always does, because if it didn’t, we’d have bigger problems to worry about.