FirstStepsInvesting is an education publisher built for one person: the first-time investor who has heard the word “investing” for years, wants to start, and has never been shown the order of the steps. It is published by CLEARDEAL LLC.
We take the published orders of operations — the frameworks the personal-finance world has taught for a decade — and compute them with the reader’s numbers, in plain words, with every figure stamped to its 2026 IRS source. We decode the fifty words a beginner meets first. We answer the fear questions with mechanics and math.
We never name a stock, a fund, or a ticker as something a reader should buy. We never set a reader’s mix. We never publish “what to buy now”, timing calls, or broker rankings. Those lines are not prudishness — personalized securities picks are regulated advice, and this site is education, deliberately and entirely. At the forks where a person deserves a human, our pages say so and point to fee-only fiduciaries.
The tools and pages are free. The one product is the $39 First Steps Pack, sold once, with no subscription and no affiliate deals with any brokerage — brokerages appear on this site only as interfaces to walk through, in alphabetical order.