Investing All-in-One For Dummies

Eric Tyson

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119873051
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

Make the most of your investment portfolio with a mix of assets from stocks to real estate to cryptocurrency

There's nothing more satisfying than seeing the balance of a financial account grow month over month. But before that can happen, you need to know the best places to invest your money. Who can you trust for solid, reliable investing advice?

Investing All-in-One For Dummies offers sound guidance for investors at every level. Whether you're stumped by stocks, baffled by bonds, mystified about mutual funds, or curious about cryptocurrency, this book gives you a solid foundation in those investing concepts and many others. After reading the expert advice and considering your risk tolerance and timeline, you can confidently choose the best investments for your financial goals.

Containing advice from 10 different Dummies investing guides, Investing All-in-One For Dummies shows you how to:

• Set short- and long-term investing goals, invest to minimize your tax hit, and develop an investing strategy using a mix of investment vehicles
• Decide when to buy, hold, or sell an investment
• Choose the right mix of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds to create a diversified portfolio
• Identify real estate investment opportunities and find the capital to make purchases
• Execute trades through an online broker instead of using a traditional investment firm
• Evaluate modern investing trends like cryptocurrency and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing

For anyone who wants to dip their toes into the markets or who tends to leave their investment decisions in the hands of someone else, Investing All-in-One For Dummies is the must-read resource when you're ready to make informed decisions and pick solid investments for your financial future.

Book 1

Getting Started with Investing

Contents at a Glance

1. Chapter 1: Exploring Your Investment Choices
   1. Getting Started with Investing
   2. Building Wealth with Ownership Investments
   3. Generating Income from Lending Investments
   4. Considering Cash Equivalents
   5. Choosing Where to Invest and Get Advice
2. Chapter 2: Weighing Risks and Returns
   1. Evaluating Risks
   2. Analyzing Returns
   3. Compounding Your Returns
3. Chapter 3: The Workings of Stock and Bond Markets
   1. How Companies Raise Money through the Financial Markets
   2. Understanding Financial Markets and Economics

Chapter 1

Exploring Your Investment Choices

IN THIS CHAPTER

Defining investing

Seeing how stocks and real estate build long-term wealth

Understanding the role of lending investments and cash equivalents

Knowing where to invest and get advice

In many parts of the world, life’s basic necessities — food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and taxes — consume the entirety of people’s meager earnings. Although some Americans do truly struggle for basic necessities, the bigger problem for other Americans is that they consider just about everything — eating out, driving new cars, hopping on airplanes for vacation — to be a necessity.

This book is here to help you recognize that investing — that is, putting your money to work for you — is a necessity. If you want to accomplish important personal and financial goals, such as owning a home, starting your own business, helping your kids through college (and spending more time with them when they’re young), retiring comfortably, and so on, you must know how to invest well.

It’s been said, and too often quoted, that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. You can add one more to these two certainties: being confused by and ignorant about investing. Because investing is a confounding activity, you may be tempted to look with envious eyes at those people in the world who appear to be savvy with money and investing. Keep in mind that everyone starts with the same level of financial knowledge: none! No one was born knowing this stuff! The only difference between those who know and those who don’t is that those who know have either devoted their time and energy to acquiring useful knowledge about the investment world or have had their parents instill a good base of investing knowledge.

Getting Started with Investing

Before the rest of this chapter discusses the major investing alternatives, this section starts with something that’s quite basic yet important. What exactly does “investing” mean? Simply stated, investing means you have money put away for future use.

You can choose from tens of thousands of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and other investments. Unfortunately for the novice, and even for the experts who are honest with you, knowing the name of the investment is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath each of these investments lurks a veritable mountain of details.

If you wanted to and had the ability to quit your day job, you could make a full-time endeavor out of analyzing economic trends and financial statements and talking to business employees, customers, suppliers, and so on. However, you shouldn’t be scared away from investing just because some people do it on a full-time basis. Making wise investments need not take a lot of your time. If you know where to get high-quality information and you purchase well-managed investments, you can leave the investment management to the best experts. Then you can do the work that you’re best at and have more free time for the things you really enjoy doing.

An important part of making wise investments is knowing when you have enough information to do things well on your own versus when you should hire others. For example, foreign stock markets are generally more difficult to research and understand than domestic markets. Thus, when investing overseas, hiring a good money manager, such as through a mutual or exchange-traded fund, makes more sense than going to all the time, trouble, and expense of picking individual international stocks.

This book is here to give you the information you need to make your way through the complex investment world. The rest of this chapter clears a path so you can identify the major investments, understand the strengths and weaknesses of each, and get information on seeking advice.

Building Wealth with Ownership Investments

If you want your money to grow faster than the rate of inflation over the long term and you don’t mind a bit of a roller-coaster ride from time to time in your investments’ values, ownership investments are for you. Ownership investments are those investments where you own an interest in some company or other asset (such as stock or real estate) that has the ability to generate revenue and profits.

Observing how the world’s richest have built their wealth is enlightening. Not surprisingly, many of the champions of wealth around the globe gained their fortunes largely through owning a piece (or all) of a successful company that they (or others) built.

In addition to owning their own businesses, many well-to-do people have built their nest eggs by investing in real estate and the stock market. With softening housing prices in many regions in the late 2000s, some folks newer to the real estate world incorrectly believe that real estate is a loser, not a long-term winner. Likewise, the stock market goes through down periods but does well over the long term. (See Chapter 2 in Book 1 for the scoop on investment risks and returns.)

And, of course, some people come into wealth through an inheritance. Even if your parents are among the rare wealthy ones and you expect them to pass on big bucks to you, you need to know how to invest that money intelligently.

If you understand and are comfortable with the risks and take sensible steps to diversify (you don’t put all your investment eggs in the same basket), ownership investments are the key to building wealth. For most folks to accomplish typical longer-term financial goals, such as retiring, the money that they save and invest needs to grow at a healthy clip. If you dump all your money in bank accounts that pay little if any interest, you’re more likely to fall short of your goals.

Not everyone needs to make their money grow, of course. Suppose that you inherit a significant sum and/or maintain a restrained standard of living and work well into your old age simply because you enjoy doing so. In this situation, you may not need to take the risks involved with a potentially faster-growth investment. You may be more comfortable with safer investments, such as paying off your mortgage faster than necessary.

Entering the stock market

Stocks, which are shares of ownership in a company, are an example of an ownership investment. If you want to share in the growth and profits of companies like Skechers (footwear), you can! You simply buy shares of their stock through a brokerage firm. However, even if Skechers makes money in the future, you can’t guarantee that the value of its stock will increase.

Some companies today sell their stock directly to investors, allowing you to bypass brokers. You can also invest in stocks via a stock mutual fund (or an exchange-traded fund), where a fund manager decides which individual stocks to include in the fund.

You don’t need an MBA or a PhD to make money in the stock market. If you can practice some simple lessons, such as making regular and systematic investments and investing in proven companies and funds while minimizing your investment expenses and taxes, you should make decent returns in the long term.

However, you shouldn’t expect that you can “beat the markets,” and you certainly are not likely to beat the best professional money managers at their own full-time game. This book shows you time-proven, non-gimmicky methods to make your money grow in the stock market as well as in other financial markets. Books 3 and 5 explain more about stocks and mutual funds.

Owning real estate

People of varying economic means build wealth by investing in real estate. Owning and managing real estate is like running a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Book 1: Getting Started with Investing
• Book 2: Investing in Your 20s and 30s
• Book 3: Checking Out Stock Investing
• Book 4: Looking at Bond Investing
• Book 5: Moving on to Mutual Funds and Exchange-Traded Funds
• Book 6: Investing Online
• Book 7: Introducing Fundamental Analysis
• Book 8: Investing in Real Estate
• Book 9: Investing in Trends
• Index
• About the Authors
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement