Invest your money

Are you happy with your personal finance? Does your expense exceed your income? To measure how healthy your personal finance is, you just need to calculate the difference between how much money your receive and how much money you must spend in a month. If you have surplus, then you are good. As you can see there are two component to calculate: income and expense.

You can increase your income by doing something part time. Online business is very popular now and can help you increase your income. One thing that you should have for your income is passive income. This is an income which goes to you without you working. You can get this kind of income from interest of your saving account and stock dividend. Other might invest in forex trading using automated forex robot. But remember forex is very dangerous. You can earn a lot of money and loss a lot of money too.

The second thing you should watch is your expense. Besides your regular expense like food, there are other expense that can make you suffer which is interest from loans and credit card. Remember that your loans and credit card will affect your credit score. With FICO credit score you will know how healthy is your credit. If you want to learn more about personal loan, then you can visit personal-finance.com.au for more info. They have great resource on personal loan.

By Ian Sani.

Ok, now you have your money after saving it from the hard work you have done in previous years. So where can you invest your money? That is a million-dollar question. There is no same place for every one to invest. The first two thing you need to know before asking that question are:

• How much is your investing target return
• How much risk are you willing to take

So your answer might be, “I want a ten percent return with minimal risk”. Sounds realistic? Remember that the higher return you want, the riskier it will be. There are many kind of investment out there. The most common place to invest money are to stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, and starting your own business. Each investment has their own characteristic. It’s your job to know their characteristic and match it with your preference.

Bond, mutual funds, and real estate generally have lower risk than stocks and starting your own business. With stocks you can loss your money in minutes. Imagine if you had bought Citibank stock at the start of the year at $7 per share. Guess how much it is now? It’s around $3 at mid July. A 50% drop in half a year. See how you can lose money from stock. The same applies if you own your own business. There are many companies that are closed at it’s first year. Imagine how much money you could loss this way.

If you don’t know anything about investing and want to leave it to the pros, then you can try mutual fund. A mutual fund is a professionally managed type of collective investment that pools money from many investors. Although it is professionally managed, it does not means that you won’t lose money from it. Those professional can also loss money, but at least their knowledge is a lot more than you.

Many first time investors think that they should invest all of their savings. This isn’t a good idea. To determine how much money you should invest, you must first determine how much you actually can afford to invest, and what your financial goals are.

First, let’s take a look at how much money you can currently afford to invest. Do you have savings that you can use? If so, great! However, you don’t want to cut yourself short when you tie your money up in an investment. What were your savings originally for?

It is important to keep three to six months of living expenses in a readily accessible savings account – don’t invest that money! It is your emergency fund.

Next, determine how much you can add to your investments in the future. If you are employed, you will continue to receive an income, and you can plan to use a portion of that income to build your investment portfolio over time. If the money that you have available for investments does not meet the required initial investment, you may have to look at other investments. Never borrow money to invest, and never use money that you have not set aside for investing!