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interest loans first before investing your hard-earned cash. Mortgage, car, and school loans may be exempt, but if you for example have credit card debts with 18% interest you'd have to at least make a 20% after-tax return on your investment before you can justify not paying off your debt. (I am allocating a conservative 2% for the time and stress associated with investing.) A consistent 20% return on investment is a very tall order and you should consider yourself lucky if you can pull it off. Of course borrowing money is a quick way to get started with investing, but consider that a bad investment made on borrowed money could be a fast track to financial ruin. Losing your own money (as depressing as it is) is always easier to swallow than losing someone else's who needs to be paid back. If you haven't had a creditor breathing down your neck asking for payment, I suggest you keep it that way, and if you have, then I don't need to tell you about the stress of losing your investment and then having to come up with the funds to pay back the loan.

If you do have some cash reserves to begin investing (let's say $1000 or more for beginners) there are several options to consider:

There are plenty of business opportunities that can be initiated on a shoestring budget. For example, if you have a good recipe for baking cookies you may be able to start a local cookie business (out of your own house) with little capital. Later if your business picks up steam, you can expand it to other areas and increase your revenues. Other businesses such as high-tech start-ups require large capital investments to start and they may take years to become profitable, if they ever do. Since most people do not have a large sum of cash or credit around or they may not want to sink all their life savings into the business, they secure funding. There are several paths available to a person to acquire financing but all require an iron-clad and detailed business plan, …