When you save and invest for the long term, you’ll want to take the time to check how the money you put into savings and investments are doing.
Saving and investing for the long term requires more than just starting an online saving account or investing in a few mutual funds and letting them sit there hoping they grow no matter what.
Here are 3 simple actions you can do that will make you feel confident about your savings and investments:
- Check your online savings account balance and transfers to ensure it reflects what you’ve been saving and what you’re expecting.
- Check your retirement plan account that your have through your employer. Don’t panic if it’s less than last quarter. If it’s steadily gone down for the last two or three quarters, we’ll make note of that and see how it does this third quarter of 2007. However, if it’s gone up this last quarter then great!! Use Morningstar to check how you’re doing by comparing your funds to others like it and the indexes that are used for the benchmarks of your funds.
- Check your Roth IRA and see how it’s doing. The market’s have been on fire the first two quarters of 2007. Head over to Monringstar and compare your funds by again, searching for them and comparing them to their indexes and the other funds in the same category.
That’s it!! Hopefully that takes you less than 1 hour. Pretty simple and helps educate you for the long term. In another post we’ll explore what to look for when you’re comparing the funds you own with other funds.
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