Whoever said life insurance is good way to invest or save your money is totally wrong and possibly illegal. Life insurance only purpose is to protect you family from devastation of loss of income. If you are the main provider in providing source of income to the family and you die, life insurance will cover your income. Now most people are under-insured and so this death benefit may not last that long. That why term insurance is better so that you can buy the right amount of coverage versus what coverage can you buy base on income.The money in your whole life policy is not safe at all. Its not FDIC insured, it gets a low rate of return, and you lose it all if you die someday. If you ever wanted to use it, you have to borrow it. When you borrow money, you lower the face amount of your policy. So it is better to save your money in a Roth IRA than in life insurance. If you die someday, your beneficiary will get your investments.Investing is a complicated matter because there is no guarantee that your money will earn a return. You can't predict how the stock market will perform in the future. But base on past history of the stock market in United States, the long term trend is that the stock market continues to grow.How should you invest? Have you heard about mutual funds? A mutual fund is an investment company that pools together investors money and invest it into various companies (could be as little as 25 companies or as high as 300 companies). Because mutual funds invest in so many different companies, mutual funds are said to be diversified. Mutual funds are affordable and you can invest as little as $25/month or you can put in a lump sum of $500 and just let it sit there.There are many mutual funds out there and only a few of them can match your investment objective. Before investing, you should figure out your investment objective, meaning are you willing to accept higher risks to get higher returns? Once you figure out your investment objective, it is now time to pick the mutual funds that meets your objective.Which mutual fund should you pick? Look at some of the popular mutual funds such as Fidelity, Legg Mason, Van Kampen, and so on. They offer all kinds of mutual funds with variety of different risks and objectives. Then obtain a prospectus of that mutual fund before investing into it. You should read this prospectus very carefully. Check its past performance, its expense ratio, its turnover ratio. top holdings in the mutual fund, and so on. Your financial advisor should be able to help you out in this.Good luck in investing. The best tip you can take from me is invest systematically. That means you invest the same amount of money every single month. What this do is that it lowers the cost per share.
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