recession or not. It’s like the same concept that one normally would do index funds over 5-10-15-20 years. The biggest advantage of an index fund was you could make really tiny $300 contributions each month and forget about it. You can do this with ETFs now too… And pretty soon, hopefully it will be easy to do this with your own basket of stocks. rather than moving a big chunk of it all at once hoping you times it right.

Times have certainly change. When I got my first trading account while I was a teen in 1990, it was like $72 from Pacific Brokerage to buy 300 shares of Intel. Then when I was in college, I was all giddy when Schwab offered a flat rate $49.95…. Then when I started working 96, trading commissions dropped to $29 flat fee when I bought my first shares of Qualcomm stock…Whohoo… And then it became $12.95, and $9.95 And then $4.95….And now it’s $0.

People these days are so lucky.. Well, technically they still charge you pennies for certain things like ADRs. But I think out of my 363 trades this year, 172 trades were after the no commission change went into effect, and I think I paid a total of $3.23 in fees. lol.