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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One individual that has help me to understand and make good choices in the stock market has been Jim Cramer. I’m sure you heard of him and most likely if you’re looking to invest in the stock market, you’ve watched his daily show on CNBC. There’s a lot more to the man and his philosophy than just his one hour show Monday through Friday.

The latest book that he’s written about the stock market is titled “Stay Mad For Life”. The title has is a play on words in regards to his show, Mad Money.

The book starts off with Jim explaining in detail how you need to start preparing for retirement without foregoing the needs of the present. A great message that many of us never received growing up, either by our parents or by school. How many of us were ever taught as teenagers to understand the concept of compounded interest or basic knowledge of personal finance?

He continues by showing us the importance of enrolling into a 401K plan has soon as possible and that the longer you wait, the more money you will miss out on in the long run when it’s time to retire. He writes about how to properly invest and to be actively involved with your retirement fund (he refers to it as retirement capital) and dispels some misconceptions about how certain employment funds can help you.

In the next section he talks about investing for a lifetime, not just investing for your later years. Investing for your retirement and not for the present is something that he goes into detail with and what you can do to make that happen. Explaining the difference between stocks and bonds and how a balance between them will help you.

He writes about the importance of family finances, especially for those with children. The need to teach your children while they are young about money and how it works. Going into specifics about home ownership and getting the right mortgage for your investment.

He also has released twenty new rules of investing. Along with his other rules and his ten commandments, they will give you a clearer picture of what you need to do when investing in the stock market.

Revealing the five bull markets along with twenty stocks for the long term is a section in the book that I found very interesting. I’ve looked back at these stocks and over the long term they’ve have done great and are well-run companies that should continue to do the same in the future.

In his last section he goes into detail about mutual funds. This section is great for those who don’t have large amounts of capital to get started growing their portfolio.

All in all, I found this book to be very informative and I recommend it to anyone wanting to invest in the stock market. I’ll be going into more details about each chapter in later posts but for now I wanted to tell you about a great deal that I took advantage of myself.

After I tried the free trial of Action Alerts Plus investment service, I got so much out of it that I joined for the whole year. Along with my paid subscription, I received Mad Money for free!

First, click the banner below, or the one in our sidebar, to sign up for his 14 day free trial of Jim Cramer’s Action Alert Plus.

After the two weeks are finished, if you sign up for a yearly membership you’ll continue with this great service and get Mad Money for free.

If for some reason, you’d rather just go ahead and buy the book right now, click the banner below. You can purchase it through amazon.com’s secured server. After you read it, tell me what you thought of it.

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