ETFs – 100 Steps Mission

Step 53 of the 100 Steps mission to financial independence: To invest or not to invest? — Step 53 of the 100 Steps mission: To invest or not to invest?

The big question is of course whether you should or shouldn’t start investing. Ask anybody and you are likely to get very different answers, some saying they can recommend putting in some money monthly, others saying only the really wealthy or dumb invest in the market, whilst still others see it as their main way to (early) retirement.

The truth is, whether or not to invest depends entirely on you, your personal (and financial) situation, and the reasons you might want to invest in the first place. In this step I’ll try to give you some pointers to think about to help you determine whether or not you should invest, but the ultimate decision is yours and you have to feel comfortable and happy with that decision.

My boyfriend at the time (he’s my husband now), suggested we’d start investing in 2009 when the market was at a low. Now I wish we had, as we would have been able to buy lots of really cheap shares, but at the time I didn’t know anything about money and didn’t feel comfortable putting money into something that I didn’t understand. Of course I regret not having bought those cheap shares now, but I don’t regret not putting in money without knowing what I was doing and whether I really wanted to invest. Continue reading “Step 53: To invest or not to invest” →

Step 52 of the 100 steps to Financial Independence: Investing through Index Funds — Step 52: Investing through Index Funds

It is now time for an introduction to the third main way of investing. As you were able to appreciate in step 50 on handpicking stocks and step 51 on mutual / collective funds, both ways have some very strong advantages, most notably the possibility of making lots of money on the stock market. Yet the opposite unfortunately is also the case and rather more likely than the first scenario… As we’ll see below, the third way of investing aims to find a middle ground between making money on the market and avoiding losses.

Index investing – an overview

Imagine looking at a long list of all the stocks and shares in a particular market – an index (such as the S&P 500) – and buying shares of every single company in that index in the same proportion as their relative size in the market. By buying all the shares of all the companies in the index, you basically copy the market and therefore will almost exactly get the same returns as the market average. (It will normally be just a fraction below due to the small fees you pay). If the index goes up by 8% your return will be around 7.8%, if it goes up by 13% your returns will be around 12.8% etc. That’s what index investing does. Sounds simple and indeed it is simple.

Of course as a small investor you’ll never have enough money to buy shares of all the companies in the index, which is why index investing – like with mutual funds – pools money of different investors together in order to increase buying power. Continue reading “Step 52: Investing through Index Funds / ETFs” →