About Indexfunds

You have saved some cash and are thinking about investing. What should you do? As recommended by Jim Cramer(Mad Money CNBC) an index fund is one of the best ways to save money for retirement. What is an index fund? An index fund is a mutual fund that spans an entire index like the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index fund symbol VTSMX or the Schwab Total Market Index Fund symbol SWTSX. These are safer than picking stocks. Instead of relying on a fund manager to actively select which stocks or bonds the fund will hold, an index find buys all of the securities in a specific index like the S&P 500 index.

Index funds offer built-in benefits:

a)Low costs

b)Lower risk through broader diversification

c)Less taxable income or greater tax efficiency

d)Dividends and profits

My Experience

I actually have invested in a Schwab Total Stock Market index fund symbol SWTSX. In the beginning of 2018 I opened an account with Schwab.com. I had read a blog thedeepdish.org and he praised the best way for beginners to invest in the stock market is an index fund. He has some good posts. Taking his advice I invested in the Schwab Total Stock Market Index fund with a little help from chat function on the site. You can do it yourself by typing in the abbreviation for the fund and adding the money through a bank account. I invested $4000. In half a year I made around $400 or 10%. That�s pretty good and is considered an income stream. A goal is to have multiple income streams to make maximum money again another post I will cover(Link to income streams post). As far as taxable income I am not sure what I have to pay, but like I mentioned it is less taxable income than other investing. If the account is not tax deferred you have to pay taxes on dividends and capital gains or profits. Your broker like Schwab will report this to you. You can set the Index fund to reinvest all dividends and profits so it goes right back into the fund. So, all you have to do is sit back and check occasionally it if you want to. The money keeps building. Do some more research but, I recommend the Schwab Total Market Index fund. Vanguard like Warren Buffet picked is also a good choice. You should keep track of the DOW Jones Industrial Average to see how the market is doing. Right now the DOW is way down in 22,000 instead of 25,000 where it was some time ago. So it may be a good time to invest. Check it out and make your own decision.

I�ll start off by saying, cryptocurrency sucks. It is definitely not something I am passionate about. It represents greed like the game show Deal or No Deal. That show is horrible. The reason why I think its sucks is that I tried writing this post five times and every time I went on Google to research I got a headache. However, I think I got it together. I will touch on a little of the history, some of the different types of crypto-currency, some about investing, and some ways to get free buttcoin, I mean bitcoin. Is it a valid investment, I�ll show you my experience with Ethereum. Bitcoin some history about digital currency Cryptocurrencies are a digital currency. Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. So a little less than 10 years old. Still in its infancy. The government doesn�t control it, computers around the world monitor it and it�s embedded in cryptic code(crypto-currency) so it would be almost impossible to hack. It�s very hard to trace transactions. That�s why criminals and drug dealers are using it on the dark web. It is starting to make its way as a viable payment source. Craigslist(link) is now accepting Bitcoin for its transactions. You can also use affiliate marketing and work in different aspects to get paid in bitcoin. My experience investing in Etheruem There are some main cryptocurrencies and a ton of what are called altcoins. Altcoins are startup coins that are much smaller. There is the potential to make more money with the right startup altcoin than other cryptocurrency. I invested in Ethereum, the other big currency besides bitcoin. My investment I will say, hasn�t panned out. I started by investing $849 in 2017 and my investment went down by 50%. I had the F.O.M.O. (Fear of Missing Out) on this great new investment. I still have the Ethereum and will just leave it there and forget about it till 2019. Coinbase.com(Link) is the site I used and is a reputable site in the list of cryptocurrency exchanges. They are supposed to be the authority site for the main currencies. As I will extrapolate in Index Funds(Link index fund post) Coinbase has an index fund that is probably not a good idea unless something changes in the digital currency market, but could be a way to invest in cryptocurrency for beginners. Alt-coins Alt-coins are startup coins and may or may not make it as a currency. There are now 1500 different altcoins. There is real money to be made if you find the right altcoin. This is pure speculation and you can do research for a little better idea. Defining Bitcoin To invest you should be able to explain to others what you invested in. Here we go with the bitcoin definition: �A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash [that] would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution�. So basically, Bitcoin is a digital currency that could be exchanged from one person to another, where that payment doesn�t go through a bank. The thing is you could make two times your investment in just a few days with the right alt-coin. You could also lose money like I did. There is a lot of information and players in cryptocurrency. I suggest if you want to invest do your homework to learn as much as you can about altcoins or maybe invest in bitcoin since it is less than half of what it used to be in 2017