Investing
Last week I wrote about setting up an emergency fund.
Alisha commented,
I love Dave Ramsey! Great post! I was wondering though, how did you set up your mutual funds? We’re in that middle ground of paid off everything, but need to save!
I guess I need to explain myself a little better. When we started paying off our debt we set aside $1000 in a savings account for emergencies. It wasn’t until after we had paid off all of our debt that we started saving for our emergency fund (3 to 6 months of expenses). We read that the best place to keep your emergency fund is in a high interest money market savings account. After reading this article, we decided to open our account at ING. We have been pleased with the service and have no complaints.
After our emergency fund was fully funded we set up our Roth IRA accounts. We went with Fidelity, although there are many, many great choices out there.
The best advice I can give someone about saving or investing is to do it automatically. Almost all investment companies and banks have features that allow you to set up automatic withdrawals from your bank account into your investment account. This is important because it forces you to save. If it were up to me, I would probably forget to deposit the money every few months, which would lessen my savings and investments. Automatic deductions allows the bank to do the work for me and I worry about one less thing.
I am not a financial planner, so please do your own research before opening any accounts or making financial decisions for your family.
AUTHOR | Toni
Toni, one of the original 3 Moms, is a military wife and stay-at-home(schooling) mom of six, soon to be seven great kids. On her personal blog, The Happy Housewife, she writes about saving money, healthy eating, recycling, homeschooling, life as a mom, and crafting.
I’m so glad to see you blogging about Dave Ramsey - my husband and I just finished his Financial Peace University course in April and are still struggling to wade through baby steps one and two. We $1000 in savings but then our car and furnace broke simultaneously and *poof* there it went. So its nice to read a little bit about someone else’s journey to financial peace! Keep up the good work!