Starting to invest requires far less money than most beginners expect. On regulated European platforms such as Scalable Capital and DEGIRO, ETF savings plans start from as little as €1, and fractional shares let you buy portions of individual stocks for under €10.
The practical minimum depends on three factors: the platform’s deposit requirement, its fee structure at low balances, and whether it supports fractional trading. Platforms like DEGIRO and Interactive Brokers have no minimum deposit, while eToro requires €50–€100 depending on the country. At small balances, the fee-to-capital ratio matters more than the deposit threshold itself. A €1 trade fee on a €10 position creates a 10% drag before any market return.
For monthly contributions, the standard benchmark is 10–20% of take-home income, typically €50–€200 for a median earner. Even €50 per month builds meaningful wealth over time through dollar-cost averaging and compounding. A €100/month investment at a 7% average annual real return grows to roughly €52,000 over 20 years, with reinvested returns contributing more than the investor’s own capital.
Before committing any amount, four financial readiness conditions must be met: a liquid emergency fund of 3–6 months of expenses, no outstanding debt above approximately 7% APR, a consistent monthly budget surplus, and a time horizon of at least three to five years. Capital needed within 12–24 months does not belong in equities, where short-term volatility can force a sale at a loss.
How much do you think you need to start investing?
Choose one — see how your answer compares with other readers.
What Can You Invest in With a Small Amount of Money?
With a small starting amount, beginners have access to three main asset categories: ETFs and index funds (accessible via savings plans from under €10), fractional shares of individual stocks, and robo-advisor portfolios with minimums typically starting at €250.
- ETFs and index funds sit at the top of this list because they offer built-in diversification at the lowest possible entry point. An ETF savings plan lets you buy a slice of a broad market index, such as the S&P 500 (a US equity index tracking the 500 largest publicly listed American companies by market capitalisation) or the MSCI World (a global index covering approximately 1,500 companies across 23 developed markets), for as little as €1–€10 per month depending on the platform. This means a beginner with €50/month can build exposure to hundreds of companies without needing to pick individual stocks.
- Fractional shares come second. Platforms that support fractional trading let you purchase a portion of a single stock rather than a full share. If one share of a company costs €500, you can buy €10 worth instead. This opens access to high-priced stocks that would otherwise be out of reach for a small portfolio, though it concentrates your capital in a single company rather than spreading it across an index.
- Robo-advisors rank third for accessibility. These automated portfolio services, such as Scalable Capital’s wealth management tier or Moneyfarm, build and manage a diversified allocation for you, but they typically require a higher starting deposit, often €250–€1,000 depending on the provider. In exchange for that higher entry cost, a robo-advisor handles asset selection, rebalancing, and reinvestment without requiring the investor to make individual decisions.
Below these three, traditional mutual funds from providers such as Vanguard, Fidelity, or Amundi generally require higher minimums (€1,000 or more in many cases), and individual bonds are rarely practical for small starting balances. For most beginners, ETFs purchased through savings plans and fractional shares represent the most realistic and affordable way to get started in the world of investing.
Yes, €100 is enough to start investing on most modern regulated platforms, particularly through ETF savings plans on platforms like Scalable Capital or DEGIRO where positions can be opened for under €10, though the fee-to-capital ratio at very low balances deserves attention before committing.
On Scalable Capital, for example, a €100 deposit lets you set up an automated ETF savings plan that executes monthly at no transaction cost on the free tier. On DEGIRO, the same €100 gives you access to a core selection of ETFs with low or zero commission. In both cases, the minimum effective amount per position is well below €100, meaning you can spread that initial deposit across two or three ETF positions if you choose.
Fees deserve attention at this balance level, though. A platform that charges €1 per trade on a €10 position takes a 10% cut before the investment has even moved. At €100, that same €1 fee represents 1%, which is still high relative to the long-term average annual return of a broad index fund tracking the S&P 500 or MSCI World (roughly 7–10% nominal, 5–7% real over multi-decade periods). Fractional shares face the same arithmetic: the smaller the position, the larger the proportional drag from any fixed or minimum fee.
None of this means €100 is too little. It means that at this level, choosing a platform with low or zero transaction fees on small positions matters more than it would at higher balances. A beginner investing in stocks with little money should prioritize fee structure over platform features when starting at this scale.
Yes, micro-investing apps and round-up tools allow you to start with any amount, including spare change, but the fee structure on balances below €5–€10 per month typically consumes a disproportionate share of returns and makes this approach ineffective as a long-term strategy.
Round-up tools, such as Plum or Moneybox, work by rounding your everyday purchases to the nearest euro and investing the difference. If you spend €3.40 on coffee, the app invests €0.60 automatically. Over a month, this might accumulate €15–€30 depending on your spending patterns. Micro-investing apps operate on a similar principle, allowing deposits as low as €1 or even less.
Here is where the arithmetic works against you. Many of these platforms charge a flat monthly fee, often €1–€3, regardless of balance size. On a balance of €10, a €1 monthly fee represents a 10% annual drag before market returns even factor in. At that rate, the fee alone can erase years of modest compounding gains. The practical floor amount where micro-investing becomes financially meaningful, rather than just psychologically satisfying, is typically around €25–€50 per month, where the fee drag drops below 2–3% annually.
Micro-investing has value as a behavioral tool: it automates the habit of setting money aside. But it should not be confused with a serious investment strategy at sub-€10 monthly amounts. Once a beginner can commit €50/month or more, moving to a standard platform with lower proportional costs will produce meaningfully better outcomes.
What Are the Minimum Deposit Amounts on Major Investing Platforms?
Minimum deposit requirements differ significantly across regulated platforms, from zero on DEGIRO and Interactive Brokers to €50–€100 on eToro, and the practical entry point also depends on whether the platform supports fractional shares and how accessible its ETF savings plan feature is.
The following table summarizes the key figures for the most relevant platforms available to beginners:
| Platform | Minimum Deposit | Fractional Shares | ETF Savings Plans | Regulatory Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DEGIRO | €0 | Limited (select ETFs) | Yes, core selection at low/zero commission | Netherlands (AFM), BaFin |
| Interactive Brokers | $0 | Yes, from $1 | Yes | United States (SEC/FINRA), multiple EU entities |
| eToro | €50–€100 (varies by country) | Yes, from $10 | No native savings plan | Cyprus (CySEC) |
| Scalable Capital | €0 | Yes (via savings plans) | Yes, from €1 | Germany (BaFin) |
| Trading 212 | €1 | Yes | Yes (AutoInvest pies) | Bulgaria (FSC), UK (FCA) |
| XTB | €0 | Yes (fractional shares on select stocks/ETFs) | No native savings plan | Poland (KNF), multiple EU |
What matters most for a beginner is not the minimum deposit alone but the combination of deposit minimum and fractional share availability. A platform with a €0 minimum deposit but no fractional shares still requires you to buy full shares, which can cost €50–€500+ each depending on the asset. A platform with a €50 deposit minimum but fractional access from €1 gives you far more flexibility at low balances.
Regulatory jurisdiction also matters. Each of these platforms operates under the supervision of a recognized financial authority, which means client funds are held in segregated accounts and covered by investor compensation schemes such as the ICF (Investor Compensation Fund) in Cyprus, which covers up to €20,000 per client, or the FSCS (Financial Services Compensation Scheme) in the UK, which covers up to £85,000 per eligible claimant. A beginner comparing platforms should confirm that the entity serving their country of residence is regulated by a reputable authority, such as BaFin in Germany, the FCA in the United Kingdom, or CySEC in Cyprus, before depositing any amount.
How Much Should You Invest Each Month as a Beginner?
For most beginners, investing 10–20% of take-home income each month is the standard benchmark. In practice, this means €50–€200/month at a median income level, and even consistent €50/month contributions produce significant long-term growth through dollar-cost averaging.
Where does that 10–20% come from? It derives from the 50/30/20 budgeting framework (50% needs, 30% wants, 20% savings and investing), popularised by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi in All Your Worth (2005) and referenced by the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It reflects the share of income that can typically be directed toward long-term wealth building after essential expenses, debt payments, and emergency fund contributions are covered. For someone earning €1,500/month after tax, 10% means €150; for someone earning €2,500, it means €250–€500. If you can only manage €50/month right now, that is still a viable starting point, and it is better than waiting until you can afford more.
What makes small monthly amounts effective is dollar-cost averaging (DCA), a systematic investment strategy designed to reduce the impact of short-term price volatility by investing a fixed euro amount at regular intervals regardless of market conditions. When prices are high, your €100 buys fewer shares; when prices drop, it buys more. Over time, this averages out your cost per share and removes the need to predict short-term market direction. For a beginner, DCA eliminates the single most paralysing decision: “is now the right time to invest?” The answer, with DCA, is that the timing of any single contribution matters far less than the consistency of the habit.
Do not wait for the perfect amount. Start a consistent contribution schedule and increase it as your income grows. A beginner who invests €50/month consistently for 20 years will build more wealth than one who waits five years to start at €200/month, because of the compounding effect described in the next section.
This might look like an error, but it’s not. The math just heavily rewards starting early, even with amounts that feel too small to matter. Someone close to me kept saying he’d start investing “when he had enough to make it worthwhile,” and by the time he finally opened an account, he’d sat out five or six years of compounding that no catch-up contribution could replace.
So if nothing else from this article sticks: the starting amount is almost irrelevant. Starting is what matters.
Filippo Ucchino
Co-Founder and CEO of InvestinGoal - Introducing Broker
Compounding works by reinvesting your returns so that each month’s gains are added to the principal, meaning future returns are calculated on an ever-growing base rather than the original sum. A €100/month investment at a 7% average annual real return, the approximate historical average of the S&P 500 since 1928 net of inflation (documented in NYU Stern’s Damodaran dataset), grows to roughly €17,400 over 10 years, €52,000 over 20 years, and €122,000 over 30 years.
To understand why those numbers escalate so sharply, consider what is happening at each stage. In the first 10 years, you contribute €12,000 of your own money and earn approximately €5,400 in returns. In the second decade, you contribute another €12,000, but your returns over that period jump to roughly €28,600, because the base your returns compound on now includes both your contributions and all previously reinvested gains. By year 30, your total out-of-pocket contributions are €36,000, but reinvested returns account for roughly €86,000 of the total, more than twice what you put in.
This is the core mechanism that makes starting with small amounts worthwhile. A beginner who delays investing by five years, waiting to accumulate a larger lump sum, does not just lose five years of contributions. They lose five years of compounding on those contributions, which cannot be recovered by investing more later. The acceleration is non-linear: the final ten years of a 30-year investment horizon generate more growth than the first twenty combined.
Why 7%? That figure reflects the historical annualised real return of the S&P 500 since 1928, as documented in the NYU Stern / Damodaran dataset, and is broadly consistent with the Dimson-Marsh-Staunton global dataset (Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook), which reports approximately 5.0% annualised real return for world equities since 1900. Actual returns in any given year will vary considerably: the S&P 500 has posted negative calendar-year returns in roughly 27 of 97 years from 1928 to 2024 (about 28% of the time), with drawdowns exceeding 20% in the 2000–02 dot-com crash, the 2008–09 financial crisis (approximately –57% peak to trough), and the 2020 COVID-19 selloff (approximately –34% in five weeks). The compound interest effect does not guarantee a smooth upward curve; it describes the mathematical tendency over long holding periods when returns are consistently reinvested rather than withdrawn.
Are You Financially Ready to Start Investing?
Financial readiness for investing rests on four conditions that must be evaluated before committing capital to markets: a liquid emergency fund, a manageable debt load, a consistent monthly budget surplus, and a time horizon long enough to weather short-term volatility.
These four conditions matter more than any platform minimum. A platform may let you open an account with €0 and buy a fractional ETF for €1, but if the money you invest is money you cannot afford to lose or leave untouched for three to five years, the accessibility of the platform does not make the decision sound.
Each of the sections below addresses one of these conditions directly. If all four are met, you are in a position to start. If one or more are not, the priority is to resolve them first, because the cost of investing before you are ready (forced selling at a loss, debt accumulation, financial stress) almost always exceeds the cost of starting a few months later.
| Condition | Minimum threshold | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency fund | 3–6 months of essential living expenses in a liquid savings account | Without this buffer, an unexpected expense forces you to sell investments during a potential downturn, locking in losses |
| High-interest debt | No outstanding debt above approximately 7% APR | Paying 15–20% credit card interest while earning 7–10% in equities produces a guaranteed net loss |
| Monthly budget surplus | A consistent amount you can invest each month after expenses and debt payments | Irregular or forced contributions lead to missed months and undermine the dollar-cost averaging effect |
| Time horizon | At least 3–5 years before you need the money back | Capital needed within 12–24 months does not belong in equities, where short-term volatility can force a sale at a loss |
An emergency fund covering 3–6 months of essential living expenses must be in place before investing, because without that buffer you risk being forced to liquidate your positions during a market downturn to cover an unexpected cost, which locks in losses at the worst possible moment.
Why? Markets fluctuate. If your car breaks down, you lose your job, or you face an unexpected medical bill, you need cash available immediately, not capital tied up in equities that may be down 15–25% at the moment you need to sell. This is not a rare scenario: the U.S. Federal Reserve’s 2023 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) found that 37% of American adults would not be able to cover a $400 unexpected expense using cash or its equivalent, and a 2023 study of German households by Wiersma found that roughly one in three could not cover an unexpected €2,000 expense within one month. A liquid savings account is the correct vehicle for an emergency fund, not a brokerage account, because it guarantees access without exposure to market timing risk.
Why 3–6 months specifically? Three months provides a minimum cushion against common short-term disruptions (job loss, major repair, temporary income reduction). Six months offers a safer margin for people with irregular income, single-income households, or those in industries with longer job search timelines. The fund should cover essential expenses only: rent or mortgage, utilities, food, insurance, debt payments. It does not need to replicate your full lifestyle spending.
A beginner who starts investing before building this reserve is taking on a specific and avoidable risk: forced liquidation during a market downturn, which converts a temporary paper loss into a permanent real one.
It does not have to be one or the other. Once your emergency fund is secure and high-interest debt is under control, you can and should save and invest simultaneously rather than waiting until you have saved a target lump sum.
This is the most common false dilemma beginners face: the belief that they must choose between building savings and starting to invest. In reality, the two serve different functions. Savings protect against short-term risk (the emergency fund). Investing builds long-term wealth. Once the financial base threshold is met (emergency fund funded, no toxic debt), there is no mathematical or practical reason to continue accumulating cash in a low-interest savings account before directing a portion of your budget surplus toward investments.
In practice, the order looks like this. First, build a liquid reserve of 3–6 months of expenses. Second, eliminate or reduce any debt above approximately 7% APR. Third, from whatever monthly surplus remains, allocate a consistent amount to investing while continuing to maintain the emergency fund. Waiting until you have €5,000 or €10,000 “ready to invest” before opening a brokerage account costs you time in the market, and as the compounding section above demonstrated, time is the single most valuable input.
Yes, debt carrying an interest rate above approximately 7% APR should be cleared before investing, because the arithmetic is straightforward: paying 15–20% annual interest on a credit card balance while expecting 7–10% annual equity returns produces a guaranteed net loss on every euro left invested rather than used to repay debt.
Forget personal preference or risk tolerance for a moment. This is subtraction. If your credit card charges 18% APR and your investment portfolio returns 8% in a good year, every €1,000 you invest instead of using to pay down the card costs you €100 in net losses annually. Over five years, that gap compounds, because the debt interest compounds against you at the same time your investment returns compound in your favour, but at a lower rate.
7% APR is the practical dividing line. Debt below this rate, such as many mortgages, subsidised student loans, or 0% promotional balances, does not automatically need to be eliminated before investing, because the expected long-term return on a diversified equity portfolio is likely to exceed the interest cost. Debt above 7%, particularly credit card balances and high-rate personal loans, should be treated as the first priority.
So list all outstanding debts by interest rate. Anything above 7% gets paid down aggressively before investment contributions begin. Anything below 7% can coexist with a regular investment schedule. There is no scenario where carrying 18% debt while investing at 7–10% expected return is a rational allocation of capital.
You should only invest money you can commit to leaving untouched for at least three to five years. Capital you may need within twelve to twenty-four months does not belong in equities, where short-term volatility can force a sale at a loss before the market recovers.
This is the final readiness condition, and it is the one most often underestimated by beginners. Opening a brokerage account and buying an ETF takes minutes, but the implicit commitment is measured in years. Based on NYU Stern / Ibbotson data, the S&P 500 has delivered positive total returns in approximately 88% of all rolling five-year periods since 1926, and in roughly 94% of rolling ten-year periods. But even over very long horizons, risk does not disappear entirely: a 2020 study by Anarkulova, Cederburg, and O’Doherty, analysing 39 developed markets from 1841 to 2019, estimated a 12% probability that a diversified equity investor with a 30-year horizon will lose relative to inflation. Within any single year, a decline of 10–20% is not unusual, and larger drawdowns (30%+) occur during recessions. A beginner who invests money they plan to use for a house deposit in 18 months is not investing; they are speculating on short-term market direction, whether they realise it or not.
Think of your money in two categories: investable surplus and near-term savings. Money earmarked for a goal within the next one to two years (a move, a car purchase, a wedding) should remain in a savings account or equivalent low-volatility vehicle, even if the return is minimal. Money with no defined near-term use, and that you can genuinely afford to watch fluctuate without needing to act, is investable surplus.
If all four conditions are met (emergency fund in place, high-interest debt cleared, monthly surplus available, and a time horizon of three years or longer), you are financially ready to start. As this article has shown, platform minimums are rarely what holds beginners back. What holds them back is investing capital they cannot afford to commit, because a forced sale at a loss due to poor timing or unexpected need is the most common and most preventable way beginners lose money in their first years of investing.