The following smart investments for young people will help anyone that would like to get off on the right foot to building a prosperous and comfortable life.

Use Self Control: Self control is a skill that is learned. Many people learn self control during childhood, but if you did not, the sooner you can learn the benefits of delayed gratification, the quicker it will be to keep those finances under control. While easy credit allows an effortless purchase, waiting until the money is available offers a better option. Who wants to pay credit card interest on food or clothing that is here today and gone tomorrow.

Set Goals: Without goals, individuals do not have an effective strategy to a secure financial future. Having goals is the key to making the best choices regarding one’s financial future.

Take Charge of Your Future Financially: If a young person does not take time to learn money management, their money will be mismanaged by others. Unfortunately, some of the people are going to be unscrupulous and ill intentioned. They may hope to make a profit for themselves using your money.

Rather than being dependant on others for financial planning, the investor should take time for reading and learning about personal finance. Once armed with this knowledge, avoid letting others catch you unaware.

Keep track of spending: One of the first things to learn is that expenses cannot exceed income. Budgeting is the best way to make the hard choices. If you take time to add up what is spent on coffee each morning, you can start to make small, yet manageable changes in the expenses of everyday living that can have as large an impact on finances as a large raise.

Begin an Emergency Fund: One theme repeated in almost any financial advice is to make the first payment to yourself. Regardless of the amount owed to credit cards or student loans or the amount of your salary, some amount should be set aside in a fund for emergencies every payday.

Start Retirement Saving Now: While retirement seems a long way off, it will be here sooner than you think. The earlier you start saving, the less money earned through wages you will need to invest, and the larger your retirement nest egg will grow. Within a few years, early retirement savers will be working on money that allows the optional plans for retirement and not just the necessities.

Understand Taxes: Because every dollar that is earned is subject to taxes, knowing how they work will let you know what your take home pay will be. This is necessary to see if you are going to earn a living wage.

Guard Your Investments: Insurance is one of the most economical investments to ensure that the money you earn and save does not suddenly vanish. Renters should insure the contents of their homes. Home owners will need home owners insurance. Disability insurance offers protection of one’s ability to earn money.

Characteristics Of Ideal Investments For Beginners

Low Initial Investment and Maintenance: The ideal investment should not require a huge outlay of money as this barrier may prevent the beginner from investing. In addition, there should be a very low cost to maintain the investment. That is where index funds and mutual funds come in. Here are some index funds basics that you should for investing.

Automatic. Young investors do best with payroll deductions to get started.

Transparent Growth. Young investors need to be able to see the money that is being invested grow. As the value of the investment grows, it creates excitement for the young investor. Investments that can be monitored online are often good choices.

Low Risk. While this may be controversial, young investors that have great losses in the beginning can be discouraged from further investing. Higher risk investments can give higher yields and young investors do have longer to recover.

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Growth Investing Defined

When we talk about growth, we are not just talking about any positive % return.  The reason why 2-3% return doesn’t work, even though it is a positive number and technically your money is growing, is because of inflation.  If there is 2-3% inflation every year, than you aren’t making much money.  So even for nominal growth in your investment portfolio, you need more than a 4% growth to make it ‘grow’.

Growth is often paired agains value investing on the other side.  This investing style looks for fundamentally good companies with good business models and financials.  It looks for growth, but in solid companies that are undervalued by the market.

Small Cap Stocks

One of the best ways to get good growth is investing in small cap stocks.  Small caps have room to grow unlike large cap companies like GE or Wal-mart.  Think of small caps as getting in on the ground floor of an investment opportunity.

Small cap stocks are companies that have a market cap of between $300 million and $2 billion.  The market cap is calculated by taking the number of outstanding shares and the share price and multiplying them together.

Small Cap Funds

If you don’t want to go out and look for these individual stocks, you can invest in small cap funds that use this strategy.  If you go the ETF route like investing in the iShares Russell 2000 index fund ETF, it will be relatively cheap compared to a mutual fund and you won’t have to do the stock picking yourself.

If you want to go even further, there are mutual funds and ETFs that have an explicitly aggressive growth investment strategy.  These funds will be very volatile so you need to be willing to stay for the long haul to smooth out it’s dips.

Emerging Markets

If you want to go even further than that, you can invest in small caps in the emerging markets.  This sector of the global economy is growing at a faster rate than the developing world’s economies.  That makes it a tide that is raising all ships.  Likewise, small caps will have more potential for faster and more growth than large cap stocks in this sector.

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