Recently, I’ve been thinking about a question: why do so many people wait until they have a few million before they start investing? This idea is already outdated. Look at today’s price increases—mortgage interest rates have stayed steady at 2.2%, and the purchasing power of every dollar is being diluted. For people who are working regular jobs, saving up to 1 million might take several years, but 100,000 is a target you can reach with real effort.

I’ve noticed that many people underestimate the power of that 100,000. It’s not just money—it’s a weapon you use to fight inflation. Investing really doesn’t require a massive principal. What you need is the right mindset, choosing the right products, and then the compounding effect of time.

Start with budgeting. This sounds basic, but it is absolutely the first iron rule of investing. Treat yourself like a company: figure out your income and expenses, and squeeze out a stable stream of free cash flow. Most importantly, invest using idle money. Because investment targets don’t rise in a straight line—they go up and down. If you suddenly need the money halfway through, that’s often when you end up losing.

Once you have 100,000, the next step is to find a specific goal. Everyone’s situation is different, so the way you invest should be different as well. For office workers, regular fixed-amount purchases of financial products are usually the most suitable. That way you can participate in the market without constantly tracking it. If your goal is to have monthly distributions to cover your phone bill and utilities, high-distribution products are a good fit. Many funds now offer distribution yields up to 7% to 8%. With 100,000 invested, you could receive 7,000 to 8,000 per year, or about 600 to 700 per month—enough to cover communication expenses.

But if what you want is to buy a phone or go abroad for travel, you may need a principal of 30,000 to 40,000. In that case, you’d need to generate 30% to 40% returns from 100,000. That requires a more proactive strategy, such as swing trading. The advantage of small capital is flexibility: you can invest wherever opportunities arise, like nomads. Entering and exiting won’t affect the market. Many trading platforms now have very low requirements for small capital, so you can participate in US stocks, indices, precious metals, and cryptocurrencies.

The key is to choose the right direction—swap turnover for return rate—so you can accumulate principal quickly. At the same time, put your work income back into investing as new principal. With compounding, your assets can grow like a snowball, getting bigger and bigger. Only by appropriately increasing turnover and using leverage appropriately can the speed of wealth accumulation surpass expectations.

For small investors with stable jobs, time is their biggest advantage. Distribution-type funds or high-yield ETFs are especially suitable because they can generate stable cash flow—like giving yourself a monthly pension. As long as the time horizon is long enough, distributions may even exceed your salary. Although this method grows assets more slowly, it has the advantage of fast returns and is easier to stick with.

If you’re a high-income professional—such as a doctor or an engineer—busy with your main job and with no time to monitor the market, ETFs are a good choice. ETFs that track a broad market index will automatically weed out weaker stocks and keep stronger ones. Taking the US S&P 500 as an example: over the past 100 years, the average return has been as high as 8% to 10%. Compared with the 5% return from a US dollar time deposit, putting the same 10 years of money to work would yield 100 at 10% per year, turning into 236 after 10 years, while at 5% per year you’d end up with only 155—an almost doubling difference in principal.

But you need to be mentally prepared: the stock market carries risk. The 2000 internet bubble, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and global inflation in 2022—although they all rebounded afterward and even hit new highs, if you need the money in the middle of those events, you can only stop-loss. This kind of long-term investing is more suitable for people with high income and strong risk resilience.

If you’re an active investor with plenty of time—such as a student or someone whose work is business-based—and you have time to research market information, you can try to capture trends and volatility. The US interest-rate hiking cycle is approaching its peak, and it will inevitably shift toward rate cuts. The supply of US dollars will increase, and after the final rate hike, the odds of shorting the US dollar are high. A falling US dollar can also stimulate cryptocurrencies, so going long on cryptocurrencies during this period can be a good investment. In addition, the stock market often has popular themes that get traded up from time to time, and companies tied to those themes have room to rise. AI concept stocks are the best example.

Now let’s look at assets worth investing in the future. I divide them into four roles: cornerstone-type, growth-type, transformation-type, and defensive-type.

Defensive-type assets, such as gold, do not pay distributions. Returns come from price differences. Gold can effectively hedge against inflation and currency depreciation, and its “safe-haven” appeal becomes especially prominent when the economy is unstable. Big surges in the gold price occurred from mid-2019 to mid-2020, and again from 2023 to 2025. During those periods, uncertainties such as the COVID-19 pandemic, US rate cuts, and the Russia-Ukraine war were the corresponding drivers.

Transformation-type assets are like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is no longer an early, pure speculative tool. When it starts to be included in ETFs, sovereign funds, and even corporate balance sheets, its role is shifting into a digital reserve asset. According to the latest data, Bitcoin’s performance over the past year indeed reflects market volatility. But in the long term, the trend of increasing allocation by sovereign nations continues.

Growth-type assets refer to products that have the potential to sustain rapid growth in revenue and profits in the coming years. For example, data centers, AI servers, and cloud computing: they have high costs and high barriers to entry, and once a moat is built, it can be very deep. NVIDIA is the leader in AI computing. Its GPUs and data center platforms are core infrastructure for large AI models. It represents a long-term story of computing power becoming commercialized and profit expanding. TSMC is the leader in semiconductor foundry services and provides underlying support for AI, the metaverse, and the automation industry chain. It has technical leadership and works closely with major AI players, supporting steady long-term orders. NextEra Energy is one of the largest green electricity and electric grid integration companies in the US. It has natural advantages in scale and regulatory environment during the energy transition. In the next 10 years, AI electricity demand will surge, so the logic of investing in power generation capacity and the power grid is more robust than investing solely in solar and wind power.

The mission of cornerstone-type assets is very simple: don’t get left behind by the world. 0056 is Taiwan’s most well-known high-dividend ETF. Over the past 10 years, it has distributed a total of 60%, and the stock price has increased by 40%. If you save 100,000 every year— even if you spend all the distributions—after 13 years, the distributions for a year would still be 100,000. After 25 years, the annual distributions could be over 220,000. By then, if retirement labor insurance and pension provide 20,000 per month, you could still have around 40,000 in additional income. SPY mainly tracks the 500 strongest US companies. Over the past 10 years, its stock price rose from 201 to 434, for a return as high as 116%. Its average dividend yield is about 1.1%, and its principal growth is about 8%. Even though the distributions are lower, its ability to grow capital gains is far stronger than that of Taiwan stocks.

In the end, becoming a small millionaire or a small “wealthy person” doesn’t require massive capital. As long as you have a good investment mindset, the assets above are all valuable targets. What you need is nothing more than enough patience to wait for compounding, or enough time to research and analyze when to enter and when to exit. With the right mindset, the right products, and enough time, wealth accumulation is just around the corner.