PCCLOSEOUT

With most of us, decisions come, decisions go—we make them and deal with the consequences when we have to. But we all make decisions about our lives, financial and otherwise, all the time:
What kind of a car do I think I should buy?
When do I think I should buy it?
Where should I send my child to school?
What color should I paint the bedroom?
Do I really want to go to dinner at ,y favorite restaurant on Saturday night, with such a busy week ahead and my proposal due at work on Monday?
Is such-and-such an issue worth the fight it’s going to cause if I bring it up with my partner?
Might this or that stock that I keep reading about be a good stock to buy?
Such decisions come up every day, and always that inner voice is there to guide us in making them wisely—if we let that voice have its say.
When these decisions come up, I am asking you now to start keeping track of them: What was the decision that had to be made?
What did your inner voice, your first instinctual response, tell you to do?
What did you actually do?

Please write down the answers and keep them wherever you keep the monthly bills. Now see how the decisions played themselves out, depending on whether or not you followed your voice.
Should you have painted your bedroom that ivory, which was your first impulse, instead of the yellow?
Should you have bought a new car when you knew you should have, before the old one collapsed for good? Did the stock you were thinking about in fact go up?
Didn’t you really know deep down inside that little Jenna would be better off at a school that was less competitive?
You will see the results for yourself. Testing your voice will enable you to trust it. It’s your voice, and when you begin to take action based on what you yourself truly believe, you’ll begin to feel power over your life—and over your money.

When I started as a stockbroker, the financial world was quite different from the way it is today, not even two decades later— and it’s still changing fast. You might think that this means it’s all the more important to have a financial adviser, or a certified financial planner like me, look after your money for you, but the opposite is true.
The changes in the financial world are actually making it much, much easier, and much, much safer, for individual investors to invest and look after their own money.
When I first started out at the city, money-market accounts were just beginning, mutual funds numbered in the low hundreds and hadn’t yet been embraced by a wide range of investors, much less changed the way millions of us now invest for our futures. Discounted ways to invest were just starting, which meant that the most common way into the stock market was through a company like mine.
With a full-service brokerage firm you’re paying full-service prices: you’re paying for their real estate, their overhead, their business lunches, their advertising, their commissions on all kinds of brokers. They are reputable, certainly,the language and workings of investment, you may even decide that the way you wish to be respectful to yourself and your money is to have an adviser at a full-service firm, fees notwithstanding.
As for the discount firms, they’re thriving. Why? Because smart consumers always flock to where they’ll get the best deals for their money. On their way, they stop to study what they’re buying and where they’re buying it.

A mutual fund starts out as a pool of money that many investors just like you have put their money in together— mutually. The manager or managers of the fund take all this money and put it into different investments. The manager is the one who decides what he or she wants to buy and sell. Sometimes these decisions are made by a team of people; more often just one person or two people decide, based on their judgment and research by many others.
Each mutual fund invests in different things, and the goal of each fund is different. Some invest for long-term growth, some for income, some for a combination of both. (Income funds invest in bonds and have lower chances than a growth fund of making a lot of money; they generate present-day income— retirees might own these, for example, after they’ve seen their money grow during their working years.) Some invest in stocks just in the United States; some, those known as international funds, invest only in stocks overseas; funds called global funds invest in both. The variations go on and on, but if you have a specific interest, I guarantee that you can find a mutual fund that addresses it. When you invest in a mutual fund, basically you own a tiny fraction of each share of stock or whatever they’ve purchased, so even if you own just one mutual fund, your money is still quite diversified, because you own a little of everything they’ve invested in.
If you had a financial adviser at a full-service brokerage firm like Merrill Lynch, he or she would have to consult you before making any transactions, and you would have to pay a commission almost every time you bought or sold anything. That’s not the case in a mutual fund, where the manager has free rein over the money in the fund and you’re not charged a commission when transactions are made. You will receive a prospectus and information with a breakdown of what the mutual fund has been up to, but you’re not notified day to day, By buying shares in the fund, you have made the decision to trust the fund manager.
A good mutual fund is a great way to invest money, particularly small sums of money: You achieve diversification, commission-free trading within the account, and a professional manager or team of managers who are buying and selling and doing what they think best.