A couple quick thoughts on investments, for those of you now becoming the age at which you begin to invest, like me, or even if you've been investing your whole life.  The market is a scary place, and you'll hear a million different strategies and funds to invest in.

I've spent dozens if not hundreds of hours looking over investment material, and here's what I've come up with.  You've probably heard it before, but:

Invest in index funds.  Period.

I gave my money to a brokerage to manage for me, because I didn't want to spend the time to watch it and take care of it.  I ended up losing about 40% of my investments, by a broker actively managing my money.

Now I've balanced my money exactly between four index funds, a large cap, a mid cap, a small cap, and a bond fund.  Their symbols are:

NAESX (small cap)
VIMSX (mid cap)
VFINX (large cap - S&P 500)
VBLTX (bond fund)

I bought all the funds from Vanguard, who tend to have the lowest fees, and I have my account at Ameritrade.  Since you're handling your own money, just open an account at whichever place will give you the cheapest mutual fund trades.

This is an amazingly stable set of funds.  For a reference point, if you bought $1000 of each of these funds on January 1st, 2000, at just about the beginning of the dot com crash, three years later, on Jan 1st, 2003, you would have $3881.  That's a loss of three percent over the ENTIRE dot com crash.

So that's it. Buy index funds, and don't worry about your money.  Index funds beat almost every managed fund, and a distributed index fund allocation like I outline here will beat almost everything, hands down.

Feel free to email me if you have any comments or questions.  tcoziahr@hotmail.com

Performance of my investments

Today's market performance