From the category archives:

Investing for beginners

All about Online investing for beginners (or offline for that matter). Articles for beginners about investing in stocks, mutual funds, index funds, real estate, or any other forms of investing.

Recommended articles for beginners

What is an IRA?
What is the difference between a Roth and Traditional IRA?
Interview with a millionaire
The importance of investing in your beliefs
The one thing I would teach a recent college grad
What is a Roth 401k?
9 Tips from Warren Buffett
The Basics of Investing [video]
Roth IRA 101
Should you sell your stocks or buy more
Diversification strategy from the Bible
Can you buy real estate with an IRA?
Using a Roth IRA as an emergency fund – a good idea?

Other investing articles for beginners
Just keep scrolling down and you will find more investing articles.

How To Donate Stocks & Mutual Funds To Charity

03.09.2010 by Craig 2 comments
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IRS tax regulations allow you to donate stocks and mutual funds to non-profit organizations. Understanding a few tax implications regarding your contribution will help add value to your donation. However, many people think that donating the stock and selling the stock to give the money to a charity yields the exact same results. However, by donating the stocks with a capital gain, both the donor and the recipient will benefit more if the stocks are donated instead of selling them and donating the cash…

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Secretary Dies And Leaves $7 Million

03.08.2010 by Bob 10 comments
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A woman named Grace Groner recently passed away at age 100 and she willed her estate to Lake Forest College – which ended up being $7 million dollars. She worked for Abbott Labs for 43 years and wasn’t the president of the company as one might expect from her estate, but rather the president’s secretary. According to the article…

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Thoughts on Socially Responsible Investing

03.06.2010 by Guest 5 comments

When it comes to money, investment plays an integral part. People are now getting inclined towards investments driven by their personal values and this summarizes SRI. SRI was more a movement that can be traced back to the 1970s. In 1980s SRI mutual funds started screening firms focusing on environmental policies and many other social issues…

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Stock Market Basics For New Investors

02.26.2010 by Craig 5 comments

The stock market consists of over 7500 single stocks. People who wish to own part of a company (in order to share in it growth) can buy publicly traded stock. A stock represents a partial ownership in a company. The most well known place where such stock exchange happens is the New York Stock Exchange. When the stock market is open, people can buy and sell their stocks (partial company ownership). Of course, the goal of every investor is to buy a stock when it is low and sell it when it is high…

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Should You Convert To A Roth IRA In 2010?

02.18.2010 by Jason Topp 10 comments

So 2010 is upon us and there is a lot of controversy regarding whether folks should convert their Traditional IRAs to a Roth IRA. Some of you might be wondering what exactly is a Roth IRA, well, here’s the basics:
A Roth is funded with after-tax contributions; the money grows tax-deferred; and withdrawals are TAX FREE!
In other words, you use money you’ve already paid taxes on to fund the Roth, and provided you meet certain qualifications you never have to pay taxes on that money again!

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401k Fees – See What You Are Really Paying

01.24.2010 by Bob 3 comments

One of the biggest downsides of the 401k is that there are so many people who need to get paid in order for the whole process to work. So with the administrators, fund managers, brokers, etc all needing to charge fees for their work, it can really cut into the investors’ earnings. To add to it, the fees you pay on your 401k kind of work in an “out of sight, out of mind” type of way. You don’t get billed for your fees, rather they are conveniently taken out without you really even knowing about it. Sure, if you do some digging you can find out a bit about what you are paying, but it is all pretty ambiguous to the average 401k account holder.

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Five Reasons to Stop Contributing Toward Retirement

01.22.2010 by Craig 12 comments
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When it comes to retirement most financial gurus emphasize one thing – save as much as you can as early as you can. They’ll tell you to put as much money as you can in the IRA, 401k, or other retirement savings vehicle. The classic advice is to save as much as you can as soon as you can. Yes, of course that is awesome financial advice. Advice that I completely agree with. Nevertheless, you might be in a situation where you think it might be wise to stop contributing to retirement, but you are finding it difficult to get any feedback on the implications of that decision…

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Making money buying and selling cars

01.09.2010 by Bob 14 comments

Everyone knows that cars are almost always a depreciating asset. You pay $20,000 for it and drive off the lot and it is worth $18,000. A year later it’s worth $14,500, and a few years later it’s worth $3500. This is the common story for most cars. And with the American obsession to spend so much of our income on our transportation, I am convinced that cars greatly affect our financial freedom. So with so many people losing money on their car purchases, how could you possible make money with cars?

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Full of Bull | Review

12.27.2009 by Guest 0 comments
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Since I like learning about stock investing, I was very excited to go through Full of Bull in the hopes of learning more about investing. However, after reading the book, I felt that except for a couple of chapters, the book was a bit of a disappointment. Reason? The central idea of the book is that ordinary, individual (retail) investors should be careful about the analyst buy/sell recommendations and not take the Wall Street literally. Despite being a relatively thin book (with 196 pages devoted to the main content), the author keeps repeating this theme throughout the book without going too much into how individual investors can better analyze the stocks…

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Build Your Own Mutual Fund | Review

12.05.2009 by Guest 3 comments
build your own mutual fund review

I read Build Your Own Mutual Fund: How to Use a Personal Portfolio to Take Control of Your Financial Life by Brian O’Connell. Before this book I knew close to nothing about the stock market so this is my first book on my journey on how to buy stocks. The premise of the book is that more and more people are creating their own personal portfolios instead of having a mutual fund because of the internet and online companies like FOLIOfn, BuyandHold.com, and Sharebuilder.com; it is becoming easier to do so.

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The New Savage Number | Review

11.28.2009 by Guest 3 comments

This book is titled after Savage’s famous 2007 book The Savage Number. This updated 296 page book takes the reader through; how much you need for your retirement (what’s your number?), how to invest your assets both prior and during your retirement, how to withdrawal your assets during retirement and how to protect your assets during retirement and eventually upon your death.

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Is the 401k a bad idea?

10.27.2009 by Bob 23 comments

This week Time Magazine had a thought-provoking article titled Why it’s time to retire the 401(k). The article is pretty long and detailed and as you would expect it points out many of the flaws of the 401(k) and argues that for many people it is doing more harm than good.
History of the 401(k)
The article [...]

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5 small business owner retirement plans

10.26.2009 by Jay Peroni 1 comment

Many times people come into my office looking for advice on how to appropriately plan their financial future. Asset location is often just as important as asset allocation. While asset allocation looks to spread your assets among many different assets classes, asset location helps you spread your assets among taxable, tax-deferred, and potentially tax-free accounts. Many who are employed by a corporation have retirement planning options at work, but what about the business owner? How do you choose the best location for your assets and that of your employees?

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