What can you do with your $25 (or approximately P1,100)? Maybe spend a day at the spa? Or treat your friends with two boxes of pizza? Buy a lovely dress maybe or a pair of shoes? While these things are worthy of your hard earned money, still they fall under the kind of expense that diminishes in value over some time and doesn’t bring you any profit in return. After a relaxing day at the spa, it’s gone when you get back to work with only a memory of it that you can hold on to. After eating your pizza, you get full and satisfied but get hungry again after a few hours. A beautiful dress or a pair of gorgeous shoes will last for quite some time and considered a good investment, too. They say power dressing will get you places, but still they depreciate over some time. I’m not saying don’t spend your money on these things and the likes, people also need them, and they sure are worthy of our money.

But given the options, don’t you think it’ll be better to spend or invest our hard earned money on things that will give us something in return? $25 may be a small amount of money that you’d think there is no way that we can put in an investment portfolio. There is a way. And I’m not talking about letting it sit in your bank account and wait for it to earn not more than 4% per annum. That’s like earning P44.00 per year or even less.
One smart way of spending your $25 or P1,100 is to join a cooperative which in turn will be your support group. Cooperative members are also part-owners; so with your $25, you will be a part-owner of a big organization. And we know that as part-owners, you will be entitled to the organization’s earnings or dividends at the least. Now how cool is that?

What you must do is to start asking about the list of local cooperatives in your vicinity and start investing.