Sometimes I have some high falutin’ ideas. For example… there are a lot of books on my bookshelf that I know I should read and a lot of trashy novels I actually have read.

When I was in college, my aunt would send me a $35 VISA or AmEx birthday and Christmas gift card every year. One year, I got it into my head that I would use it to buy stock.

I spent the whole thing on a single share of Alcatel-Lucent. How the heck I even picked that stock, I couldn’t tell you. But that one share used up the whole gift card and I was on my way to financial freedom!

Except the stock just plummeted and is currently worth $3.47 (which is actually up – there have been points over the last 10 years when it’s been below a dollar). And for a long time that put the kibosh in my interest in the stock market. What astounded me though was how easy it was!

And how cool is it that there are sites like TradeKing that make buying stock that easy? And nowadays they are set up to make sure you have access to great research tools too!

It’s my own fault that I was a goober about proper research, but it’s terrific that there are sites that make buying stocks a piece of cake.

I remember being totally overwhelmed by financial sites like Fidelity and Charles Schwab – not that they’re not useful financial institutions, but they can be pretty intimidating to a stock newbie.

TradeKing makes taking your first investing steps super easy! So when you buy stock, you pay the price of the stock, plus a trading fee. At a lot of places, the trade fee is pretty high, but TradeKing has an incredibly low fee of $4.95 per trade.

So say you want to buy Exxon stock and today it’s trading at $84. You have $275 to invest, so you buy 3 shares for $252 and the $4.95 trade fee and you still have $18 left. You can hold onto it till you have more or you can buy $13 of a much cheaper stock, plus the $4.95 trade fee and now you own 2 different stocks!

The TradeKing interface is really easy to use. Click through the prompts and answer the questions to open your account. There are a few questions that could be confusing about margins and options – if you don’t know the answer, click no. I do have to admit, I wasn’t a huge fan of having to include my employer’s address and phone number to register, but they use that to verify you don’t work for a financial firm that might be a conflicting interest.

Let’s get real here though. Coming up with the money to invest can be tough, but what’s even tougher is deciding on what to invest in.

TradeKing has you covered here too. They make it really easy to research the stocks you are considering.

Totally flummoxed on where to start? I have two systems I use for my own investing. The first is to invest heavily in index funds.

What’s an index fund? It’s a collection of stocks within a certain subset. Imagine you have an index card and write TECHNOLOGY on top and in the lines underneath Apple, Amazon, Google, Intel, etc. A technology index fund might be a single fund you buy that is made up of all those technology companies.

I prefer broader stock market funds, indexes that sample from a variety of blue chip stocks (old, established stocks that have historically done very solidly).

For instance, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund Investor Class (VFINX) is a solid choice of an index fund. It’s around $185 right now, which is a little pricey, but is made up of 500 established companies.

Index funds can sometimes seem a lot less sexy, especially when you’re trying to explain to a friend what you’re doing. I bought Apple sounds cooler than I bought a technology index fund, but by investing in multiple companies through this fund, it reduces some of the risk.

But let’s say you want a sexier stock. When I pick individual stocks, I can get pretty overwhelmed, but then I narrow it down to stocks I understand. Tesla is cool, but I don’t really understand it. Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, on the other hand, is an industry I know and experienced first hand how the recession did nothing to the cruise industry. I also know Royal has a great safety record, largely happy employees and a lot of growth going on – I know this despite the fact that I actually worked for Carnival Corp… you know all those bad ship stories in the news over the last few years? Fires? Running out of gas? Running ashore? All of them are Carnival Corp lines. So… I would feel confident investing in RCCL.

You probably don’t know cruise lines as well as I do. But maybe you’re a nurse and you know that everyone only seems to wear one brand of plastic gloves. Who makes them? If you think the company is solid, look into them.

The key is to start with a list of about 10 companies you trust. Don’t worry about numbers yet, just figure out who you think has a business model that seems to be working. Once you’ve got that sorted, you can check out my post about how to make sense of the numbers. Compare them for each of your 10 stocks and then buy the one that is the best deal.

Finally, let’s wrap up with what I think is the coolest option TradeKing offers: Maxit Tax Manager. Stocks outside of retirement accounts have tax ramifications. If you make money, you owe taxes on it. If you lose money, you can get tax breaks. Tracking this can get pretty miserable, but the Maxit Tax Manager service is awesome and does all the confusing math for you. It helps figure out what your tax obligations will be before you make any trades.

What’s stopping you from investing?