At 17, working as a support worker and saving to travel, Tash Invests typed her first investing questions into a search engine and found mostly American results. She turned to her dad instead. He pointed her toward an S&P 500 fund. She bought four units for roughly $1000 — and immediately wondered if she'd missed something.
"I bought it, and I was like, 'Okay, is that it? There must be more to it. There must be more research involved. It can't be that easy,'" she recalled. "But it is that easy."
Now 28, a mortgage broking business owner and Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree, Tash says her net worth passed $1.5 million earlier this year — built not through windfalls, but through years of small, consistent investments, a property purchase, and the discipline to leave her portfolio alone.
Why Tash Invests says $5 a week is the real starting point
Her core message for anyone who feels they need more money, more knowledge or a better salary before they start investing is straightforward: that thinking is backwards.
Micro-investing apps now allow Australians to enter the market with as little as $5, and Tash argues the value of starting that small is mostly psychological.
"We're so fine with spending $5 on a coffee. But the thought of maybe losing $5 on the stock market seems too much," she said.
Her advice is to treat the habit like a skill that needs practice at low stakes first. "Put $5 a week in and see how you go, because it's better to learn that skill with less money," she said. "Then if you do come into more money in the future, you have the skill of actually knowing what to do with it and the ability to ride the waves."
She acknowledges some of her followers watch her content for years before they actually invest. "Some people take a while, and that's okay. That's just life."
The ETF approach — and why she stopped checking her portfolio obsessively
Tash's investment strategy centres on exchange-traded funds (ETFs) — diversified baskets that can hold shares in Australian companies, global businesses, commodities like gold, and more. She notes that while some active fund managers can outperform the market over shorter stretches, consistently beating it over the long term is difficult, which is part of the appeal of a broad index fund.
She treats her investments like a fixed bill — automated, and largely ignored. "Don't look at it," she said. "The hard part is not selling and not getting spooked by the market and all the news."
When her interviewer admitted to checking his individual stock portfolio many times a day — even during a 30-second lift ride — Tash was unmoved. "If I'm not going to sell for 30 years, why do I care what's happening in the short term? I've got better things to do," she said.
To illustrate the power of patience, she uses a simple example: $100 a week, invested at an assumed average annual return of 7 per cent, could grow to around $1 million over 40 years. She is careful to note returns are never guaranteed and markets move in both directions.
The mistakes she's glad she made early
The path wasn't entirely smooth. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Tash bought an inverse leveraged ETF, betting the market would continue falling. It didn't. For every one-point rise in the market, she lost double — ultimately losing around $5000.
She also went through a phase of buying "heaps of random ETFs" before settling on a single diversified fund as her core holding.
"I'm glad I made these mistakes with smaller amounts of money," she said, adding that no amount of reading fully prepares you — you have to actually do it.
Tash says compounding has only started to feel real in recent years, with her portfolio now capable of moving by $30,000 to $40,000 in a single day. The hardest part, she says, is simply waiting in a culture wired for instant results — particularly for investors who entered the market during COVID and experienced rapid early gains.
"Once I learnt that you could almost buy yourself a pay rise and grow wealth outside of your job," she said, "it kind of seemed like a no-brainer."
