I made an investing mistake once, and I won’t make that mistake again.

There are some mistakes I made in my 20s that I’m not proud of. Not only have I dated some pretty questionable people, but I’ve also made some really bad financial choices.

First of all, I waited several years to start funding my retirement accounts even though I could have contributed to them sooner. Part of that, of course, was focusing on an emergency fund. don’t I regret it, but it was also my stubbornness to not have to part with the cash at age 22 when I was decades away from retirement.

Another mistake I made in my 20s was putting a lot of money into bonds. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but honestly it was one of the biggest financial mistakes I’ve ever made.

Play it too safe and it will come back to haunt you.

Over the course of about 10 years, I invested $20,000 in bonds. And the reason I chose bonds was because I didn’t know much about the stock market and was inherently afraid. I thought bonds would be safer, provide guaranteed returns, and minimize risk.

But the flaw with that plan is that staying out of the stock market severely limits how much my money can grow. The average annual return for the stock market over the past 50 years has been 10%. But that 10% means that not only have we had some really solid growth in the market over a number of years, but we’ve also had some pretty steep losses over a number of years.

What this tells us is that if you invest in stocks over the long term, you are likely to get a solid return on your money. You may not get the returns you want from year to year or year after year, but it will most likely pay off over time.

What I did was invest my money in bonds that paid 5% interest. So, over 10 years, you invested $20,000, bringing your investment up to about $32,500. If I picked stocks and earned a 10% annual return on my money over that period, I would have invested about $52,000.

Fortunately, I realized my mistake and corrected it in my 30s. I started building a stock portfolio in a brokerage account and have maintained a variety of investments in that account ever since.

But here’s the problem. Even though I was aiming for higher returns in my 30s, at that point I was starting with less money than I would have if I had started with a stock-heavy portfolio.

Case in point: If you invest $32,500 over 30 years at an average annual return of 10%, you’ll end up with about $567,000. If you invest $52,000 over 30 years at a 10% average annual return, you’d end up with a return of about $907,000. There is a difference of 340,000 won.

Invest in stocks from the beginning

You can’t go back in time and force me in my 20s to invest in stocks. But if you’re in your 20s and just starting out investing, take a lesson from me and consider focusing on stocks while you’re young and have the option to take on some risk.

And if you’re afraid of risk, consider that over time that fear could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost profits. That’s something you might end up kicking yourself for later.

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