Monday, 21 January 2008

Have You Invested For Your Future?

By John Spencer

If you've never done so, investing is something you must do in order to be prepared for your future. One common example of poor planning is that while it's true many young people get married every year and start families, they don't sit down and take the time to plan for the extra financial burdens they're going to face because they've done so. If you're young, it seems as though life will go on forever and that retirement is years away. Therefore, you might feel as though investing is not a high priority. However, the truth is that financial hardship can happen any time. In particular, your retirement is going to be here before you know it, and you will be very sorry that you have not saved when younger if you get there and you have nothing to live on. Your need to have savings will simply sneak up and bite you. It will seem as though one day you've been in your 20s, newly married, and just starting out in life, and suddenly, you're 40 or older and you haven't saved one bit for your future. Those years in between have passed by in a blink so that all of a sudden, you're facing your immediate future with no financial resources to live on if something should happen to you. Even so, many people still choose to ignore this very important task and continue on as they have been, without making plans so that they will be able to take care of both themselves and their children's future financial needs.

Princeton University and the Consumer Federation of America conducted a study and found that a whopping 70% of households that have annual salaries under $50,000 have less than $5,000 in retirement savings. In that same report, it was concluded that "most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck." Investing allows you to put away money that will grow so that when you reach retirement you will have something to sustain you. If you invest wisely, you could have a rather comfortable nest egg upon retirement. Of course, any type of investing carries a certain amount of risk, but different investment securities have different levels of risk. Mutual funds, for example, are considered rather low risk while stocks are considered a higher risk. But these are not your only options for investing. The options are varied and vast.

An Investment Fund Defined And investment fund can have several advantages over an individual stock portfolio. If you invest a portion of pooled funds among retail investors, firms do the work for you, retain a small fee, and this reduces the risk the investment carries among the pool of investors. The funds come from many small investors and are used to make large investments, so individual investors have much less risk but with access to many more types of securities then they might otherwise be able to have. Not only does this reduce risk, but it cuts down on high trading costs. It also lets the small investor with just a small amount of money to invest begin to save. Two different types of investment funds are available. These are mutual funds, which are open-end, and investment trusts, or closed-end.

What Is a Hedge Fund? This type of fund is typically not available to the average investor because of the income bracket one has to be in to participate. It's also more difficult to invest, and you must know much more about how the stock market works. In general, institutions and wealthy individuals use hedge funds because they have investment strategies available to them not available to the typical investor. These strategies are more aggressive than those used in mutual funds. Hedge fund investors can do program trading, leverage, sell short, arbitrage, swap, or use derivatives. Additionally, hedge funds do not have to follow the same regulations and rules that mutual funds do. The law restricts hedge funds to a maximum of 100 investors per fund. Because of this, the minimum investment amount for hedge funds is usually extremely high. In general, average investment amounts for hedge funds range from about $250,000 to more than $1 million. A management fee is paid as with mutual funds, but hedge funds are different because managers are also given a percentage of the profits, usually around 20%.

It is never too late to save for your future. Even if you are 20 or even 10 years away from retirement, wise investments made now can bring you some healthy gains by the time you are 65. Investing can help you have the ability to enjoy your golden years by relieving some of your financial tension.

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