Welcome to Investing Basics!       

If you're here, there is a good chance you've either got some money socked away or you're planning to do so. So, what are you saving for? Retirement? College for the kids? A BMW M-5? A nice little retirement beach house in Belize? 

Say you take $2000 of your savings and put it into the stock market. If your money returned 11% a year (the S&P 500's historical average), it would be worth $53,416.19 after 30 years. You would have a good down-payment on that Belize beachfront property with that kind of money.

So, maybe you don't have $2000 sitting in your bank account, but you could afford to invest your coffee or lunch money. Brown-bag your lunch and invest just $4 a day, 250 days a year. It's not a lot, but if you're in your early 20s, you've got the investor's best ally on your side -- time. If you invest $1,000 once a year in an investment that averages an 11% annual return -- the annual stock market return since 1926 -- it'll grow to more than $1 million after 46 years, which is right around the time you'll be ready to retire.

Of course, as you get older and more financially stable, you should be able to put away more to invest. Upping the ante to just $166 a month (lunch money plus about what you pay for basic cable TV and a movie channel), would put you at the million-dollar mark in just 39 years.

Simply put, you want to invest in order to create wealth. It's relatively painless, and the rewards are plentiful. By investing now, you'll have a lot more money for things like retirement, education, recreation. Whether you're starting from scratch or have a few thousand dollars saved, Investing Basics will help get you going on the road to financial well-being.