Robinhood for Beginners 2026 - Full Tutorial - What you Need to Know!

Gone are the days of your grandma's brokerage account. Thanks to easier investing apps like Robinhood, this app allows you to trade without confusion, doesn't have unnecessary fees, gives you free stocks, and a lot, lot more. But you might be wondering how this works, if it's safe, and how to make money. And today's video is the video I wish I had when I first started, including what I'd do differently if I started today, as I've learned a lot over the last six years of using the Robinhood app. I'm going to pull up my app on this screen so you can literally follow along with me. And the best part, on YouTube I have chapters laid out on this video. You can hop around back and forth between the sections that you need to learn more about. Let's start with section number one of this tutorial, which is getting started. First thing you got to do is download the app. Now you can use it on a computer too, but a lot of people use it on an app. Why? Because you can go on vacation, you can sit on the beach, you can be on a cruise, you can do all kinds of things and still be able to pull up your portfolio on demand from the phone. Now, if you haven't already started, I do have a link in the description below. It does reward both of us with a free stock. It's up to you. You can use mine, you could use a friend's, whatever works best for you. This is the screen that you're going to be taken to. It tells you, hey, you can get a free stock. That's great. All you have to do is put in your email address. It'll take you to the app store, you download the app, and then you're all set. Now the signup process is where people get stuck. Let's walk through it very quickly because this is a big question a lot of people ask me as they're getting started. And that question is, as you go through, it's going to ask you for your full government name that's on your ID. It's going to ask you for a social security number. It's going to have you scan certain documents. These things trip people up and I can understand why. Why would you want to give away your social security number? What's the legitimacy of that? Well, here's why. In Robin Hood, when you get signed up, later on down the road, you're going to be making some money, hopefully, right? You're going to be getting dividends. You're going to be selling, buying, things like that. When you make money, it's actually the law that Robin Hood has to report those earnings to the IRS. The way to do that is through your government information, through your social security and all of your data. So it's actually a legal requirement. And not just Robin Hood. I mean, the old school brokerages, they need it too. So this is not any different. This isn't some type of scam. This is actually a law because they have to do it for reporting purposes. So once you get everything signed up, you go through that process. You may have to wait a couple days at the most for them to verify your account. Sometimes I've heard people sign up and they get approved almost immediately. I've had people that sign up and they're like, hey, it's been like two days and it still says account in review. What's going on with that? Sometimes it just takes a little bit extra time. Give it a few. You can always reach out to their customer service if you're excited and want to get moving quicker. Or if you're worried and you want to ask some questions, totally your call. Now you might be asking, does the Robin Hood app work where I live? Well, if you live in any of the United States, including Puerto Rico or USVI, you're all set. Robin Hood is available. Unfortunately, though, it's not available throughout the entire world. So if you're watching this from certain countries, you may not have the ability yet for Robin Hood. Now they did just launch United Kingdom. So if you're in the UK, there is the ability to sign up for Robin Hood. If you live in the European Union, that's a little bit different because it is crypto only, not the investing holistically. So right now it's just crypto. Hopefully in the future, they will expand. What I'm going to do is in the top comment on this particular video, go check it out. As new countries get introduced over the months and years ahead, I'll update that updated comment with here are the countries that are available for Robin Hood right now. That way you don't have to wonder, hey, did they roll out to my country? Well, no, not yet, but maybe check the pinned comment. So I'll leave that down below. Now this next section is serious and that is, is Robin Hood a scam or should I be worried about it? Is it safe? That is a great question. Just like any investing brokerage, Robin Hood is lined up with the SIPC. This protects your investment money up to $500,000. So if Robin Hood, for example, would go out of business, go bankrupt, belly up, whatever, the SIPC would step in if Robin Hood doesn't already take care of you as they're going through the bankrupt procedures. Now, I don't anticipate this happening, but it's good to know the what ifs. Is this going to protect me if it goes out? But that's the same as any other brokerage. If that brokerage would go out of business, SIPC would step up and say, we got you. Now, as somebody who has legitimately used this for the last six years, have beat it up. I didn't get paid to make this review. I'm just doing it because a lot of people asked me about it and I needed to update a video I did many, many years ago about this. But here is the point. I've been using it for six years, have not had any issues with it at all. The only thing that is a little weird that you need to be aware of outside of the protection that's already covered is that sometimes people like to be scammers outside of Robin Hood. You know, the typical people that like to send you emails saying, hey, give me your account information. Or hey, it's looking like it's coming from Robin Hood, but it actually isn't. It's from some scammer who wants access to your account. This is vital. And this is section three, how to secure your account. Privacy is so important. I'm happy to say that Robin Hood makes this relatively easy. What you're looking at now is my own individual Robin Hood account. Now, anything I show you today in my portfolio is not financial advice to buy, hold, or sell anything. This is just me taking you through as guidance on how to use this app. You want to first start with your privacy of your account. If you haven't already done this and you've been on the app for a couple of years or a couple of months, do this today right now as we're going through this video. At the very bottom, as you log into Robin Hood, as you see right now, look on that little stick figure person type of thing. You see that at the bottom? Go ahead and tap on that. That's going to take you here. And if it looks like this, all you have to do is tap the hamburger menu located at the top right hand side. I'm going to tap on that and then take a look. It has all of this detail, all we care about right now. And don't worry, we'll get to the rest of this, but scroll on down to where it says security and privacy. We're going to tap on that. And this is where the magic happens, my friend, because this is where you can keep those weird scammer people away and everything you need will be right here. The first thing I recommend that you do is look at your device security. If you have something like the iPhone, if you have something like one of the phones that has some type of biometric login, whether that's through Touch ID, through Face ID, whatever, set that up. You can see right now my device security is set for Face ID. Nobody can just come in and open up my account without having this face right here to unlock the app, right? You want the same thing for yourself. I also recommend, especially if you don't have the Face ID option, to create a passkey. This is important. It can use any of the different type of authenticators to make sure that you and only you can access your account. I hate that we have to do this, everybody. I really do. But unfortunately, there's a lot of weird bottom feeding people out there that want to try to get your money from you and that's totally not cool. Don't let them have any access to your account. Robinhood makes it easy for you. Don't skip this section. So important. Now, let's talk about section number four, the accounts within your Robinhood app. Now, right here you see again, here's my portfolio live on the screen. The market is open. So today we're going to actually buy and sell a stock live on the video as well. But there's a lot of different things that you can do with the Robinhood app. Now, for beginners, the best way and the easiest way to get started is through a basic investment account. And that's what I actually have right now. You can see at the top here, investing roughly about $21,000. It's down a little bit today. That's not what I'm worried about. I'm worried about the long term, right? But that's the investment account. You can set up retirement accounts. You can set up a credit card, a joint account, which means let's say you have a spouse, significant other, and you want to both have control over this account. You can set up a joint account. You can set up different strategies. All that stuff is within this app. You can click the plus and it'll give you a rundown of all the different account types that you can decide to do based on your own opportunity. For me, I just started with investing. Now, let me take a quick pause and tell you a little bit about the retirement account in case you're interested. You can open a Roth or a traditional IRA within Robinhood. So it tells you a little bit about growth potential based on your contributions. There are limits to a retirement account. So please make sure that you take the time to understand what those limits are to see if this retirement account is worth it for you or not. If I click get started, you can see I can do either Roth or traditional. I will have a little bit more on this in another video if you want to dive deep into this particular IRA account with Robinhood. But for now, this is something that you can decide to do or not. We'll talk a little bit later about how the Roth IRA also has a match where any contributions that you put in to Robinhood, they'll actually match you a certain percentage if you have their gold plan. But we'll talk about the gold plan a little bit later in today's video. Let's get to the good stuff. This is where we're going to start really beating up the app. And I'm going to show you step by step how to do all this. Section five, depositing money. So the first thing you got to do in order to invest is you got to deposit money. Now, you're going to get your free stock when you sign up. And that'll be anywhere from five to two hundred dollars. If you're lucky and you get the two hundred dollars, please comment below so we can all congratulate you. Most of us, let's be real, will probably get the five dollars. So right now your account value when you first sign up will probably only be five dollars. You got to get it a little bit more than that because the idea is you're going to put money in and start investing. Here's exactly how you do this. You go over to the stick figure. And by the way, just memorize this. This stick figure guy is like your go to. This is where all the magic happens. Always tap on that first. And then you're going to see the menu. First thing we want to do is transfer. Right here. It's the fourth one down transfers. Now this is new. It's actually saying we're not going to let you record your screen. That's a good thing because they don't want those crazy scammers that we talked about earlier to get in. So what I'll do is I'll screenshot the steps. That way you have everything you need. Now, before you start transferring money in, you, of course, need to link up your bank account because that is where all the money will come from. So I recommend just setting up a linked account. You can hit add account at the bottom of this particular screen. It can be either a debit card or it can be your bank account. Me personally, I linked up my direct bank account. When you tap on the bank account, Robin Hood uses played. Now, I've never had any issues with this at all. I played used for a lot now in the industry. Anytime that you need to link up something, pay for something, whatever. So that's what Robin Hood uses for this particular case. First thing you want to do is fill in your phone number, activate your particular checking or savings account. Now, when you first link your bank account, it will take a little bit of time because Robin Hood is going to do a small little micro deposit into your account, typically two deposits. And then once you see them in your bank account, you have to come back to the app and say, OK, the first deposit is, let's say, 95 cents. The other one is, let's say, 30 cents. That's just an example. The reason they do that is to make sure that you truly type in the right bank account and that everything lines up. The last thing they want is for you to link up to somebody else random because you mistype the number and then things get kind of awkward. So once you have that, you're linked up, everything's good. If you want to skip all that, the debit card is usually the easier and faster route. Totally your call. Once you have either your debit or your bank account linked up, let's go ahead and deposit some money into the Robin Hood app. For today's example, I am going to tap on deposit and let's just do $10. You type in your amount and then you tap on the continue button. It's going to do one final check just to make sure you understand what's happening. $10 from your checking account to your individual Robin Hood account. You can either select frequency of one time or if you want to, you can make this automatic, which means that let's say every payday, it's automatically going to deposit some of that money into Robin Hood so you can continue to invest. You can do weekly, twice a month, monthly, quarterly, totally your call on what you want to select. For me right now, I'm just going to do one time. I'm going to hit deposit. It'll say deposit is initiated and then this happens. The instant deposit is available. This is what's very cool about the Robin Hood app. It will immediately allow you to start using that money as long as you're verified and everything's good with your bank account. That means that additional $10 is ready to trade immediately or whatever you deposited in at that time. So now that we talked about how to deposit, link up your bank account, set up recurring transfers if you want to, let's buy our first investment right here on the video. We're going to do this live in person. I'm going to show you exactly how to do it. So first thing you want to make sure of is your buying power. The buying power is important because that'll either be that $10, for example, or even more. Now, the reason you see a lot more right now is that is the cash that I have available for my different investments within Robin Hood. So I have a total of $679 in buying power, which means cash, that I can do a couple things. I can either one, buy stocks or ETFs with it. I can buy crypto with it or I can withdraw that money and send it back to my bank account. Now that's important when you go to sell stocks and ETFs. So let's say, for example, I'm just going to give you one small example. Do you see I have Tesla right now? It's up 22.96%. I could sell a portion or all of my Tesla. It takes about a day and then that money that I've made off of Tesla will show up up here in the buying power. At that point, I can decide to then withdraw those profits into my checking account or my bank account and everything's good. We'll talk about that a little bit later in today's video. But first, let's go ahead and buy a stock. Let's see. I'm going to do one that most people are familiar with and I'm going to do Apple. And the best way to start this is at the bottom of the screen, you'll see the magnifying glass. Tap on the magnifying glass and then type in either the name of the company, for example, Apple, or if you know the stock ticker symbol, in this case, it's AAPL, you can also type that in. Totally your call, whichever way you do it, it will pull up all the different options that you're looking for. I'm going to tap on Apple and here's what we got. Right now, it's going for $261 a share as of the recording of this video. That, of course, is going to change over time many different ways. You can come down here and it gives you all the details that you need from some details about the company, when it was founded, who's the CEO. Look at all this stuff. You get the volume, the market cap, all that kind of stuff that you would want to know about the stock is available to you. You can also adjust the time slot. You can go up. What's it doing in the last three months? How about the last year? How about the last five years? Look at that, up 93% in the last five years. All of this is available to you. And again, this is for the beginners. So I'm not going to go too much into the advanced stuff, but this is the stuff that you can do before you decide to buy a stock. When you're ready to buy, all you have to do is tap the trade button down below. Now, before I get to this, I want to go back to the very first statement I said in this video. This is not your grandma's brokerage anymore. Why is that? Because your grandma's brokerage back in the day would have to say in order to buy a stock, you have to buy a whole stock, which means to buy one share of Apple, you have to put up $261.88, or now it's $87, $84, whatever. You had to put in that entire $261 and that's it. You can't put any less than that in order to get one share. But thanks to Robinhood, they started a whole new thing and now everybody's doing it too. Fractional shares. This is where the magic really is for people that just want to get started with small little dollars. You don't have to worry about finding $261 to start investing. You can invest with as little as a dollar, $2, $5, $10. It doesn't matter. I'm going to hit trade and the thing that you want to worry about is just tapping on buy once you hit trade. So here we are. How much do you want to buy of Apple? Notice right now it says shares. So this is where you would have to do the old school grandma stuff, right? Now you got to put up $523. No, I don't want to put up that much money. I want to buy a fractional share in today's video. So at the very top right hand side, you see it says shares. Tap on that and just change it to say buy in dollars. All right, there we go. Now I can put in whatever I want. A dollar. Let's say we just want to buy literally a dollar of Apple and see what that does. You could do as much as you want. You can do as little. You could even do like $1,250 if you had that much in your buying power. $1,250 of Apple. You don't have to worry about how many shares that is and do the calculation. You got $1,250 in your account. Go ahead and do $1,250. For today's example, I'm going to do, let's say $50. And then I'm going to hit review. And when you're ready to go, and you can see by the way, 0.19093 shares is what it's estimating that we're going to have of Apple. So not a full share because again, that's $261. But $50, we're all set. Swipe up to submit. Sending order. Done. I now am the proud owner of $50 worth of Apple. Now, here's where people get tripped up. And I've seen this a lot on my other videos that I do about Robinhood. They say, okay, well, here it is. Here's my account. Look, I bought it. Oh, look, I'm down. It's not even a penny, but I'm down 0.01%, give or take. And my market value is $49.99. I'm not making money. Remember, if you're starting off, you got to make sure you subscribe to my channel because I talk about this stuff all the time here on the channel. We need to be set as a long-term investor. This is not like an Atlantic City or a Las Vegas casino slot machine. This is an investment. Your goal is to invest in a company that you know, like, and trust. And you've done your research on. And then over time, you want to see that grow. That's the important part of starting with your investments. So my idea would be, I'm going to put this $50 in and I'm going to forget about it over the next five years, 10 years, whatever it may be, because eventually, I want to have massive profit that I can live off of and enjoy that money for other things. The next thing, let's talk about buying an ETF. An ETF is a basket of stocks. So instead of just finding a needle in a haystack, whatever stock is going to go to the moon next, you buy the entire haystack. So you have all the little needles, which is meaning all the little stocks, right? A good example. I'm going to say QQQ. So I'm going to go back to my search icon, that little magnifying glass, and I'm going to type up QQQ. Here's an example of an ETF. Now I'm going to glaze over this very high level for beginners, but let's say I want to do QQQ. Now, if we scroll down here, we can tap on right here where it says top 10 holdings. Now here's what's cool about the haystack that I mentioned earlier. Here's all the little needles in it, right? You don't have to worry about, oh, I don't have to just buy Apple directly. If I buy QQQ, it has 7.69% of Apple in this particular holding. Look, you get NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, and these will continue to change because QQQ tracks the NASDAQ 100. I love ETFs. I love buying the entire index fund instead of worrying about the individual stocks that may go up, it may go down. So in this case, we can see that QQQ is very expensive. It's $602 a share. But remember, we can buy a small little amount. So I'm going to hit trade. I'm going to hit buy. And for this one, I'm only going to do $5. So I'm going to hit review. I'm going to swipe up. And there we go. Well, QQQ is now completed. If we go back to our account and down here at the bottom, right there it is, QQQ, looking good at market value of $5. Again, the goal is long-term. Now, if you're new to my channel and you just stumbled on this video as your very first video, there is something that I've been doing within Robinhood for the last four years, and that's recurring investments. And that's where really a lot of fun can happen with this particular investment strategy. What that means is that instead of just doing the individual purchases that we just did with our $50 example and our $5 example, you can set it to say, I want you to invest every single day or every single week, a certain amount of money. And that's the power of Robinhood on recurring investments. I have a longer video if you want to know of the deep dive of that. And I'll include that as a link at the end of this video that you can watch next. But simply put, I'll show you an example. I've been buying VOO. This is the Vanguard S&P 500. It's the top 500 companies in America, another ETF. Every day, it puts in this recurring investment. You see that? VOO daily buy tomorrow $7.24. I don't have to worry about it. Any day that the stock markets open, Robinhood automatically buys this for me. You can see right now, I have 17.3 shares at a market value of over $10,000 because I've been investing this amount of money every day for the last four years. You can learn more about this whole challenge. I'll also link that video down below if you're interested in learning how I did this and why I did this. But this has been a lot of fun. So you could decide, instead of doing a daily buy, let's say you want to do a weekly buy with your transfer from your bank. So let's say you transfer $100 in from your bank every week, every day that you get paid. And then you want $50 put into, let's say, VOO. You can then set an automatic transfer, which is what we looked at earlier from your bank account. And then a recurring investment right here on this app to say, buy $50 of VOO every Friday. Simple as that. This is super easy. It's that hands-off, set and forget investment that you don't have to worry about coming in here all the time and saying, oh, do I need to buy? No. The most important and smart investors, they just set it and forget it. And that's an important thing. When we talk about making money, right here, I'm up 39.63% as of the recording of this video right now, which means I've earned an additional $3,087. So all my money that I've been putting in over the last four years have grown an additional $3,000. That's how you make money with investing. And it has nothing to do with Robinhood. A lot of people say, well, how do I make sure I make money on Robinhood versus making money on Webull or something? That really actually doesn't make any sense. The brokerage itself is not what's making you money. It's the investing and the activities that you're doing within that brokerage that makes you money. So now that we talked about buying and all that good stuff, what about selling and eventually withdrawing? Let's say, for example, that you've been saving up for something, a new car, maybe a down payment on a car. Maybe you're saving up for a vacation and you decided, oh, instead of saving it, I'm okay with the market fluctuating. It could go up. It could go down. It could not be a good deal, but I'm okay with that. But eventually I want to withdraw that and take a really cool vacation. Well, you can absolutely do that. And here's how you can do it. So down below here, let's see, I'm going to decide to sell. I'm actually going to go ahead and sell some Tesla. So right here, you can see if you scroll down what the position currently is. I have 1.88 shares, market value 773, and I am up 22% or $143. Not too bad. So there's a couple of ways you can do this. First thing you want to do, let's say, for example, I wanted to save up for something that costs about $100. Well, that's kind of exciting because my total return is 143. So I'm actually selling the profit that I've made off of Tesla. That's pretty cool. I like that. So just like we did when we bought, we want to reverse that. You come in here, you tap the trade button at the bottom, and then we're going to hit the sell button. It's going to pop up and it's going to ask how much money do you want to sell of Tesla? Now you can tap sell all if you want to, but in this case, I don't want to sell my entire 773 of Tesla. Just a smaller amount, maybe $100. If you don't want to do dollars, you can tap up there and switch that over to selling shares. But again, my favorite is just to keep it in dollars. Make it easy for yourself. So let's go ahead and sell $100 of Tesla. That means that my Tesla available will probably be around $673 once we're done with this. I'm going to hit review, swipe up, sending order. Darn, I just sold $100 worth of Tesla. Now let's go back to the home screen because this is an important step. I ever so briefly mentioned that it does take about a day to show up in your buying power and this is the case. See how buying power is still at $624? Well, wait a minute. I just sold $100 of Tesla. Why isn't it in there? Why don't I see $700? It's because it takes a day to process. So if I tap on buying power, here we go. Take a look. It lets you know, hey, don't worry. It's on its way. Cash, $724.16. Unsettled funds, $100. There's the Tesla. That means your total is only $624. So what I need to do is wait about a day or so, or if it's the weekend, you got to wait until the next business day and then I'll have my $100, at which point I can then withdraw that money. In fact, as I mentioned, anything that's showing up in actual live buying power, as you see right here, $624, can be withdrawn at any moment. Let me show you how to do that. Any guesses on where to go? Not the magnifying glass. We're going back to our boy, the stick figure. Take a look at him down below. Tap him. If you show up on this screen, go to that hamburger menu. That'll take you over to all the different options. Instead of depositing, we're going to withdraw, but it's the same step. Go to the transfers, which is the fourth option down. So instead of depositing this time, we're just going to tap on withdraw. It then asks, how much money do you want to withdraw? I'm going to withdraw $20. I'm going to hit continue. And then it says, OK, here's your confirmation. You're wanting to withdraw from your individual to your checking, and it'll be $20. Yep, that sounds good. I'm going to hit withdraw. Withdrawal submitted. Here's a big note. This transfer may take up to five business days to complete. You can always click on view withdrawal confirmation if you want to. A lot of times that five business days or whatever it may be, kind of depends on your bank and how fast they process incoming deposits. Not always Robinhood. Sometimes it's your bank. Now, if we go back to our overall account, you'll see that the buying power has dropped to 604. Once it shows up in your bank, it shows up as Robinhood. Transfers, I believe it is. And then it'll just deposit super easy. Never had a problem with it. And again, that's a great way, especially if you're going to use that money for something that you've been investing for in the first place. Now, one of the big questions I get a lot with the Robinhood app is what about taxes every year, especially on an individual account that isn't a retirement account? What a great question. And today we're going to actually reveal how to deal with taxes on Robinhood. First thing you want to do if you're on your main screen like we are right now, tap on the little stick figure guy and we're going to scroll down to where it says tax center. Now this one's further down in the menu, but right there it is tax center. Tap on that. And then what we want to do is look at our documents. They're going to give you a consolidated 1099 form. I'm going to tap on mine. I'm actually going to show you what exactly it looks like. So as we scroll down here, it gives you quite an amount of information depending on your particular investment activity. Mine might be more than yours. So you got to remember that yours might look a little bit different. But for example, here's some dividends. With Robinhood last year, I made about $158 of total ordinary dividends. And then I made a total of $155 of qualified dividends. Cool. It'll then go through and talk about any proceeds, gains, losses, and adjustments. Now, typically with a brokerage account, like what we're talking about today, you will only have to pay taxes once you sell at a profit. If you're up, let's say, for example, my VOO, I'm up 39%. I do not owe taxes on the 39%. I would only owe taxes with VOO on the dividends that get paid out, which as you see are rather small. Or when I go and actually sell the VOO, then I would either have a short-term or a long-term tax gain that I would need to report on my taxes. Now, here's what's really nice. And this is not promoting them by any means. I mean, I'm just sharing with you what really is helpful for me. I use TurboTax. And when you go into TurboTax, it says, do you want me to just pull in all of your Robinhood statements and start that process for you? I say, yes. And it pulls that entire 1099 form. You don't have to go through and say, okay, so I have this and let me type it in. Unless you do your taxes on your own, in which case, hats off to you. That's awesome. But if you do use a tax software, a lot of times they link up with Robinhood, pull that stuff in, makes your life so much more simple. Same thing goes for if you use crypto on Robinhood as well. It'll pull all that in and report it for you. You just got to go through and make sure all the numbers line up, check a few things, and then you can submit it. Now let's move on to section nine of this Robinhood tutorial. The biggest beginner mistakes that I see. The very first thing is if the stock goes down, do I lose money? And do I have to pay anything? This is a common question that I get. So let's take a look at our Apple stock because this is actually a great example. The stocks are going to go up and down. That's just the stock market. The people that wait the longest in the stock market tend to make the most money because they don't see red and immediately get scared and sell. They let it sit for a long period of time. In fact, it's funny. It's now up to $50. Oh, now it's down to $49. It's going to go all over the place for a long time. It could be like in 2022, the stock market went down 18%. You got to be able to stomach that so you can enjoy the long ride in the future. But the big question is if the stock goes down to zero, do I have to pay money? Am I in debt to that? And no, especially if you're a beginner, do not use margin. And if you don't know what that means, if you follow everything I showed you in today's tutorial, you won't have to worry about margin at all. This is just a way to pull in cash, use your own cash, and you'll never have to owe any money. Margin's a little bit more dangerous because that means you're actually borrowing money from Robinhood that you don't already own. And if the stock goes down, you then could get a margin call, which means you've got to pay back the loan immediately to Robinhood. Don't get involved with that mess if you're a beginner. But in my case, to answer that question, if Apple would go to $0 and go out of business, no, I don't have to pay any money. It's just I lose my investment, in this case, $50. The likelihood of Apple going down, hopefully slim to nothing. The other big mistake that I see is people do buy and sell way too quickly. They treat this like a, like I mentioned earlier, Las Vegas slot machine. They go in, they say, oh my gosh, I'm up $50 and one cent. I'm going to sell it now and profit a penny. Oh my gosh, don't waste your time. Especially if for some day, maybe on certain days, you could see your 50 turn into like 55 very quickly. You got to come up with a good solid investment plan. Don't buy and sell like it's a slot machine. And that moves on to our next one, like not having a good enough plan. This is a huge beginner mistake. You know, check out the $5 a day video. That's where you can like, get some ideas on how to really help get yourself set up with a plan to maximize your Robinhood experience. So go to the description after this video and check out that $5 a day video. And you can see exactly how I've been doing this over the last four years. The next thing, and this is actually really, really important. I'm going to show you how to set this up. A big beginner mistake is they don't have a beneficiary linked up with Robinhood. Now our hope and goal is that we don't have to use that anytime soon. But should something happen to you, you and anybody that you love will have to deal with how to get money out of your Robinhood account if you don't have a beneficiary or a will set up. What a mess. Make it so much easier for the people that you leave behind by just setting up a beneficiary. It's easy to do. Go to the stick figure man, as we always do here on the Robinhood app. Then under your overall settings, go all the way to the bottom where it says settings. Tap on that and then it'll say beneficiaries. It's the third one down under account details and options. Tap on that and then add a beneficiary. It can be either an individual or if you have a trust set up, you can also set up a trust within Robinhood. The important thing here is if you would pass away, God willing, that money immediately gets transferred over to whoever you designated as your beneficiary. Not having this set up will make things so much more complicated. Just do it. Now let's move on to section 10. Robinhood Gold. This is an upsell that is totally up to you. Now what you saw in today's video up here on the screen, I do not have Robinhood Gold, but I am going to be testing it and I'll do a video later to deep dive and give you my full review. So make sure you subscribe and let me know in the comments if that would be interesting and I'll come back and give you that link. But here's some things you need to know about it. When you have the Robinhood Gold, here are the benefits you get. Any cash that you have sitting in the buying power will give you an annual percentage yield, which means it gives you interest on uninvested cash. 5% sometimes, sometimes 4%. It does range based on the market. But quite honestly, that would be a cool idea, especially for all this money I have sitting here. I have $604 just chilling right now in the buying power. Well, wouldn't it be nice to earn 5% of that? Oh man. The other thing it does is it gives you an IRA match. So we're talking about a match of all your contributions that you put into your retirement account if you set that up. It also gives you access to margin. Again, this is a beginner's video. Don't recommend doing margin. Don't take out loans because if things go bad, you get a margin call. But gold members get margin access. You'll also get the Robinhood Gold card, which gives you 3% cash back across the board on all categories. So that's an option you can reserve your spot. But here's the big question. Is it worth it? All this stuff with the Robinhood Gold. Well, it does cost $5 a month. So what you would need to do is really look at, okay, look at your buying power, how much you have sitting in cash. Are you taking advantage of an IRA match with Robinhood? Are you eventually going to want to do margin once you understand it all? And are you going to take advantage of the credit card? Weigh out all of those benefits against the $5 a month to really understand if it's worth it for you or not. I can't tell you if it's worth it, but I did tell you the benefits. It's really your call to see if it financially makes sense to spend the $5 a month against all of these different things. Now, here's my final advice for beginners. Get started and just have fun. If you're just starting off with Robinhood, this is a great way to just understand how investing works. Try it out. Do some little $5 here and there, maybe even $1. Check out my $5 a day update video and see what works best for you within this app. As I mentioned at the beginning, I've been using this for six years now. It's been so easy to use. It's not complicated with a lot of graphs and a lot of things, a lot of complications, a lot of fees. This is a commission-free brokerage. I don't pay for it. I don't have the Robinhood gold. So for me, this is the best way to get started with investing. If you have questions though that I didn't answer in this video, here's what I want you to do. Comment below with those questions. I'll either reply to you or come back with an updated video specifically addressing your question. If you're interested in starting off and supporting the channel, I'll include a link to Robinhood in the description that you can hop over. Get yourself a free stock. Would definitely appreciate it. And until next time, keep building your sharp money. Check out this playlist for more great information on brokerage apps that you need to know. And we'll see you on the next video.