Jim's Articles

Investment guides

Top strategies for how to multiply your money. If you’re saving for a house deposit and hoping to buy in a couple of years, investments such as shares or funds will not be suitable because their value goes up or down. Stick to cash savings accounts like Cash ISAs. If you’re saving for your pension in 25 years’ time, you can ignore short-term falls in the value of your investments and focus on the long term. Over the long term, investments other than cash savings accounts tend to give you a better chance of beating inflation and reaching your pension goal.

Investors often place great importance on price-earnings ratios, but placing too much emphasis on a single metric is ill-advised. P/E ratios are best used in conjunction with other analytical processes. Therefore a low P/E ratio doesn’t necessarily mean a security is undervalued, nor does a high P/E ratio necessarily mean a company is overvalued. Some mistakenly believe there’s less to lose with low-priced stocks. But whether a $5 stock plunges to $0, or a $75 stock does the same, you’ve lost 100% of your initial investment, therefore both stocks carry similar downside risk. In fact, penny stocks are likely riskier than higher-priced stocks, because they tend to be less regulated.

Funding your retirement is one of the best investments that you can make to ensure the financial future of you and your family. It’s important to plan for your retirement whether you have just finished high school at 18 or are about to enter your 60’s. It is never too early to start putting money away for your retirement. If you are planning on living a comfortable retirement based on Social Security; forget about it! According to USA Today, the average Social Security benefit paid out to retirees is a paltry $1,324 per month, which amounts to just $16,424 per year. Read more details at Why you need a retirement plan.

If you’re on a tight budget, even the simple step of enrolling in your 401(k) or other employer retirement plan may seem beyond your reach. But there is a way that you can begin investing in an employer-sponsored retirement plan with amounts that are so small you won’t even notice them. For example, plan to invest just 1 percent of your salary into the employer plan. You probably won’t even miss a contribution that small, but what makes it even easier is that the tax deduction that you’ll get for doing so will make the contribution even smaller. Once you commit to a 1 percent contribution, you can increase it gradually each year. For example, in year two, you can increase your contribution to 2 percent of your pay. In year three, you can increase your contribution to 3 percent of your pay, and so on.

One of the best investment tips from Warren Buffett is to not put too much stock (no pun intended) into each and every news headline that you see. Buffett believes in the 99-1 rule. Most investors take actions based on 1% of the financial news they consume. Doing so, they quickly sell their stocks whenever bad news comes up – e.g. a company’s revenues have fallen by 10%. If the company in this particular example has been in business for, say, 100 years, then Buffett says that it’s definitely capable of withstanding such events. In other words, people often tend to overreact.

About MultiplyMyMoney : I have more than 12 years of experience as an independent and personal financial and investment consultant. I used to run a financial blog called BuylikeBuffett which provided insight on investing, saving, money management, and all things finance. I am also the author of Your Financial Playbook: A Guide To Navigating The World Of Personal Finance a financial guide written to inform the beginning investor about the basics of the market. I decided to start a new site because I receive a great number of questions about financial topics on a daily basis. I figure that this would be a great way to answer those questions and increase financial literacy. I also figured it would be a good platform to write articles on everything from teaching how to get rich, explaining the basics of cryptocurrency, to detailing ways of rebuilding your credit score. I was the founder and president of New Horizons Financial Management, LLC, and was a registered investment advisor. New Horizons was an independent investment advisory asset management and personal financial consulting firm offering investment advisory services to high net worth individuals. See more details on https://multiplymymoney.com/.