IF YOU are living in poverty or are only scraping by, things can seem like a nightmare. Simple tasks such as food shopping and paying heating bills can be a minefield and you often need to make difficult choices.

We perhaps haven’t seen a cost-of-living crisis like this for decades and for many people, money problems are spiralling out of control. Basic things like food, electricity and gas continue to increase in price and oftentimes wages are not rising to combat this.

If you are in a difficult situation, you do have options and one thing you could consider is investment. Investment comes in many forms, including forex, stocks and shares, cryptocurrency and simple options such as savings accounts. Below, we look at how investment can help and what you can do to manage your money better.

It helps you learn about risk management

Part of successful money management is about knowing risks and when to avoid them. For example, you might want to take a loan out to buy something new for your home. There is a risk here if you cannot make repayments as this could damage your credit rating.

You need to consider if the risk is necessary. Do you really need that new item, or can you go without? Investing in things like forex helps you improve risk management and determining when something is a bad idea. You can even mitigate risks somewhat by using tools such as forex arbitrage software that help you see when currencies are priced favourably.

You can learn how to budget and maintain a cashflow

An area where many people fail when living close to the poverty line is simply managing their money. They don’t account for bills and monthly payments and often find that they need to scrape for money when payments are due.

This can be avoided by creating a budget and managing your cashflow. Investing teaches you basic skills like this as you need to allocate funds to your various investment assets, such as an ISA, shares or forex trading.

You can use the money management skills you learn investing and apply them to your daily life by making a budget and setting aside cash each month for your bills and other expenses.

It helps you build stability for your future

With factors such as the ethnicity pay gap, gender disparities and a lack of employment around the country, it can seem that the future is bleak.

However, if you spend a little on long-term investments, you can set yourself up for the future and have stability for years to come. Even something simple like paying monthly into an ISA or stocks and shares ISA, will earn interest and create a stash of cash for you to fall back on.

Investment is an excellent long-term tool that can give your family stability for generations to come if done right.

You can make consistent subsidiary income

Eventually, if you learn and develop your skills, investing can become a full-time career and there are plenty of people who trade forex, stocks and shares as a job.

Now, this does take a lot of time and effort, but to begin with, investing can be an additional income stream that you can benefit from in addition to your fulltime job. Even if you only make a few hundred pounds per month investing, that money can be put away or used to make additional investments.

Don’t think of investing as your main source of income, but as a subsidiary source that you can build on.

There is the chance to make big gains in the right circumstances

Under certain circumstances, you can also make some big investments that really pay off. Obviously, this is never guaranteed, and many factors must come into play.

However, you could make a superb forex trade, invest in a cryptocurrency at the right time or buy shares in a company before they explode in popularity and their shares sky-rocket. You shouldn’t bank all your fortunes on this happening, but it certainly is possible, and investment has definitely changed lives for the better for many people.

Consider investing today to improve your financial situation

In today’s world, it is increasingly difficult to stay afloat and deal with finances. Many countries such as the UK have economic issues due to circumstances like the war in Ukraine and this means that the cost of living is rising. Investing is a potential way to help escape poverty an