Yo dawg, we heard you like interest so we put interest on your interest so you can get money while you get money
Wed Jun 30, 2010 10:54 (UTC -5)I’m taking a finance class, and it’s been reasonably interesting so far. The professor has told us young persons how important it is to save for our retirement: we’re not likely to have Social Security or a pension to help us out. He said we should start investing in the stock market. If the average annual return on stocks is 10% (which supposedly it is), and you invest $1,000 per year for 40 years, you should end up with something like $487,851.81. A penny saved is a dollar earned.
I’ve always thought of the stock market as something that would do me more harm than good if I tried to mess with it. Several times in school, when I was too young to care about these things, we would have to invest imaginary money in real stocks, and whoever had the most imaginary money at the end would win. I lost an incredible amount of imaginary money in these things. I just didn’t get it, and I’m still not sure that I do.
Now that my finance class has taught me a little more about investing, I’d be interested in putting my money in stocks if only I could wade through all the acronyms and jargon and figure out how to get started. Two of my professors now have recommended Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street in class, so that might be a good place to start. Or maybe I need Investing for College Students Who Know Essentially Nothing About These Things and Just Want Straight Answers.
I don’t doubt that a lot of you readers have investments and know your stuff. What do you recommend for me?
For today’s cool link of the day, I give you Lemonade and Other Things, a new blog by my friend Andrea. She’s already written a lot of posts on various subjects, and I’ve found them pretty interesting. Let’s hope she keeps up the good work.
3 comments
#1 by Kirsten: Wed Jun 30, 2010 12:30 (UTC -5)
I don’t do the stock market, so I don’t know much about it, but I also don’t figure I’ll be retiring in my 60s or even 70s. I get bored too easily, so I imagine I’ll always have some kind of job.
I also read a statistic recently that people being born in the US today have an average life expectancy of 104, so retiring in your mid-60s leaves almost 40 years to go. If you educate for 20, work for 40, then play for 40, something’s out of whack. Maybe by the time I’m in my 80s I’ll have figured out what I want to be when I grow up.
I do read a few personal finance sites – Get Rich Slowly and The Simple Dollar cover a wide variety of topics and are pretty easy to read. You might start there before investing in a book.
#2 by Jordon Kalilich: Wed Jun 30, 2010 16:26 (UTC -5)
Thanks for the reminder about those sites. I followed them for a while but always glossed over the stuff about investing and retirement. Now that I’m more interested in those subjects, I should go back to reading them.
#3 by Andrea: Sat Jul 03, 2010 20:00 (UTC -5)
Man. That blog you linked to here is GREAT! I see no reason why everyone in the world wouldn’t want to visit it EVERY SINGLE DAY!