FAQ About Personal Finance For Dummies

financial answers:

Personal Finance Advice – Read books by Dave Ramsey he has a radio show and a TV show on Fox Business.

Investing – Books by Peter Lynch, William J O’Neil, Jim Cramer, and a book about Warren Buffett.

Also some websites can be good tools:

http://www.investopedia.com/
http://www.fool.com/index.aspx?source=intromercial

financial answers:

The Personal Finance for Dummies book is actually quite good and is considered by many as required reading on the subject of personal finance. So, yes get a copy.

Other than that, one of the best common sense books on the market is Dave Ramsey’s book, The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness. You can see it for free at Barnes and Nobel, and at your library. It is so enlightening, and is taught in high schools and churches everywhere. Easy to read, it helps you to get set up in life and not get bogged down with overburdening debt.

I only wish there was more in his program about choosing specific mutual and other investments.

financial answers:

Life insurance agents can only make money off by selling one product, which is life insurance. If you sold a cash value life insurance, the average annual premium is about $2000. If you sold term insurance, the average annual premium is about $1000. Lets say your commission is 95%. Would you rather get paid $1900 by selling a cash value life insurance or $950 by selling term insurance?

So there’s a huge incentive for an agent to sell cash value life insurance. Its also huge profits for the life insurance company. In cash value life insurance, your premiums are paid for two things. One is the life insurance and the other is cash value. The problem is, you really don’t know how much of your premiums is going into each part.

Some people who own this type of life policy think they own the cash value. Well, if they ever wanted to take money out, they have to borrow it and pay a loan interest on it. I don’t know about you, that doesn’t sound like ownership to me. To add more insult, if the person dies, the life insurance company keeps the cash value for themselves. (If the person wants to include cash value with their death benefit, the person would have to pay lots of premiums for it.)

With term insurance, it doesn’t build cash value. So you have the flexibility of where you want to save your money and actually own it. You can put it into a bank account, invest more into your 401k, open an IRA, and so on. Since it doesn’t build cash value, the premiums are much lower than cash value life insurance.

Why is term better? You can get the right amount of protection needed for a low amount of premiums. In the future, you may not need life insurance or as much coverage because you have less financial responsibilities. If you invest $100/month and your portfolio gets an average 12% rate of return over a 20 year period, you can potentially have almost $100k. In 30 years, $353k. In 35 years, $650k. Is your investment going to do 12% every year? Of course not. Some years it may do only 8%, some years 18%. Whatever the case is, in the long run it may average out at 12%. There is no guarantee that you will get 12%, but if you look at the history of the stock market, have you ever seen it go down in the long term?

financial answers:

You can check out Amazon, I have seen some used ones in good condition for $0.01. Also check out Half Priced Books. You can buy any book for half of its cover price.