More Investment Info For Us Average Joes

As a follow up to a previous post, "Investing For Average Joes", I thought I would include a few of the things I've learned since becoming an investor. Some of these things may be common sense to some of you and they may be brand new but you should be able to use something to help you with your investing.

One of the coolest things to do is, once you've bought a stock and it has been going up, keep an eye on it. When your stock reaches 100% above where you bought it, sell half of it to pull out your cost, so that all you have left is profit. This does two important things. One, it takes all the worry out of the equation so you can watch the stock from a comfort zone of knowing it's free money. Two, it creates more cash to invest.

I like to keep a chunk of cash in my money market account so that I have cash available should an investment opportunity arise. It is so frustrating to see an opportunity and not have any cash ready to be invested. I use www.sharebuilder.com as my trading account and it can take
2-3 days to deposit funds depending on which bank I use so if I get word from www.oxfordclub.com about a company that looks promising I want to be ready to jump in.

Before the economy took a dump, I was getting a small return on my money market account but now it is down to almost nothing. For this reason, I like to keep cash in my www.paypal.com account. Paypal pays about 1%, which is quite a bit more than a savings account at the bank. Banks have dropped the savings account interest to as low as 0.1% just so they can say it is a savings account. I think we should all band together and demand 6% on our checkings accounts but that's another story.

Paypal takes about two days to recognize a deposit but you can get a debit card to make withdrawels just like a checking account. In fact, using paypal as your checking account would make sense. 1% isn't much but it's a far sight better than nothing. Paypal also has a neat affiliation program. If you can get a business to create a new Paypal account, they will pay you 1% of the money that flows through the business account for an entire year. That could be substantial depending on the business.

I sort of got off the beaten path but it's all good info and certainly worth the Speed Of Life. I'll be adding a new post soon so watch for it and good investing!