Archive for 'Investing' Category
Finding A Good Financial Advisor
15 August 2006Consumer Reports has some good advice on their website for people looking to find a financial advisor. As you might expect, a lot of people have problems with this. Many brokerage firms will pawn off low level brokers on people who don’t have that much money saved up, often giving them self-serving investment advice:
Late [...]
Why Penny Stocks Are A Bad Investment
14 August 2006Many new investors will at some point find themselves drawn to penny stocks, which are stocks that trade for very low amounts (pennies) per share in companies that are only worth a couple million dollars. HJL Money Blog has a good post on why they aren’t really good investments. People tend to think they can [...]
How should you spend your next pay raise?
11 August 2006MP Dunleavey has written an article for MSN Money discussing this issue. It’s a shame, really, because most people use a raise as a chance to blow a golden opportunity to painlessly save some more money. You weren’t making that money before - so it doesn’t take any effort at all to live the same [...]
Owning Too Much Stock in One Company
8 August 2006A blog called the Island of Dr. Death has a post on how he narrowly avoided a financial disaster by noticing that most of his stock portfolio was in a single company and selling out before a bad earnings report dropped the stock price like a rock.
This is an important lesson for novice investors: never [...]
Should I pay off my debts and loans or invest the money?
8 August 2006This is a common question - many people who are just starting out in life tend to have debts to pay off - student loans, maybe some credit card loans, a car loan, or whatever. They also know that they need to be investing money in the long run if they ever want to be [...]
Investing Money for Beginners
7 August 2006So you don’t have any clue where to start in investing your money. This post is for you - the absolute beginner with no experience with money or finance. You need to start doing a couple of things:
1) Learn. It is not a good idea to stay uneducated. There’s no way for me to explain [...]
No Excuse is Good Enough Not to Save
1 August 2006CNN’s Walter Updegrave has an “ask the expert” article out answering the question of a person who asked:
I’m 32 and earn $50,000 a year. I don’t have much money in savings nor do I have a 401(k) plan. I do have an IRA with about $9,000 in it, however, and I plan to contribute more [...]
Emergency Funds: How much do you need to set aside?
22 July 2006An emergency fund is an amount of money you set aside to cover the unexpected expenses that life seems to throw at us. Your car broke down? Your refrigerator stopped working? The AC shut off in the middle of the summer? If you don’t have an emergency fund, and are living from paycheck to paycheck [...]
Mutual Fund Management Fees: How much is too much?
16 July 2006For those of us whose investments are in mutual funds instead of individual stocks, a primary concern is going to be the annual management fee charged by the fund. Every mutual fund charges some percentage of the assets for a variety of different fees. Management fees usually constitute the bulk of these - they average between .5% and 1% of the annual [...]