The Basics of Investing & Money

The first important concept for you to accept is that compound interest from your bank is for suckers. Compound earnings from your investments will make you rich. Got that? Okay, let’s move on. Let’s begin with why you need more money.

You want to get out of debt, You want no more money worries, You want nice things, You want to help your family and others, You don’t want to work every day for the rest of your life. We all should agree with these reasons for having more money.

What is keeping you from having all the money that you need?

The cost of living is too high, you have too many bills to pay, your job doesn’t pay enough, there’s nothing left over to save and invest. If you agreed with these reasons why you don’t have enough money, you have to change your thinking right now. Really.

There are three important things that you need to do right now:

1. protect your current investments, if any

2. open a mutual fund account, and begin contributing to it

3. get your spending under control

Protecting your current investments
If you have a 401(k), 403(b), or 457 plan at work, instruct your benefits department to move everything into a mid-cap index fund (if offered), otherwise split everything evenly between an S&P 500 fund and whatever type of mid-cap fund is offered.

If you currently own any mutual funds, they have probably lost money this past year. If they are not in an IRA, sell them now and take a tax deduction (let the IRS cover part of your loss) and take all the money and put it into a mid-cap index fund.

If you have a brokerage account, either a full-service or online account, sell all of your losers and put the money into your winners. Then tell your broker that you want to place a “stop loss sell order” at 7% under the current price.

Open a mutual fund account and begin contributing to it every month. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any money, some will even get you started with $0.00!

Get your spending under control right now. If you don’t get serious about this, you are not just throwing away the extra money that you needlessly spend, but the huge amount that this money will grow to if properly invested. This is the only way that you will get out of debt and get rid of your money worries, forever.

For more information on investing, take a look at:
http://www.swinginvesting.com