Ramit Sethi's first scholarship was $2K and he put it in the stock market. Here's the simple lesson he learned

Before Ramit Sethi became known for telling people how to build wealth, he learned one of his first investing lessons the expensive way.

Sethi grew up in a California middle-class family and knew that if he wanted to go to college, scholarships would have to help make it happen. He earned them, and when one scholarship sent him a $2,000 check, he decided to do something that probably felt very grown-up at the time: invest it.

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There was just one problem. He didn't really know what he was doing.

"I lost half my money within a matter of months," Sethi said in an interview with Mainstreet . "I was just putting it in whatever company I thought was going up and down a lot."

For a college student, that was an expensive price to pay for an investing mistake. But here's what he learned from it.