Читать книгу Investing For Dummies - Eric Tyson - Страница 57

You may have just one purpose for investing money, or you may desire to invest money for several different purposes simultaneously. Either way, you should establish your financial goals before you begin investing. Otherwise, you won’t know how much to save.

For example, when I was in my 20s, I put away some money for retirement/long-term financial independence, but I also saved a stash so I could hit the eject button from my job in management consulting. I knew that I wanted to pursue an entrepreneurial path and that in the early years of starting my own business, I couldn’t count on an income as stable or as large as the one I made from consulting.

I invested my two pots of money — one for retirement/long-term financial independence and the other for my small-business cushion — quite differently. As I discuss in the section “Choosing the Right Investment Mix” later in this chapter, you can take more risk with the “longer-term” money, so I invested the bulk of my retirement nest egg in stock mutual funds. With the money I saved for the start-up of my small business, I took an entirely different track. I had no desire to put this money in risky stocks — what if the market plummeted just as I was ready to leave the security of my full-time job? Thus, I kept this money safely invested in a money market fund that had a decent yield but didn’t fluctuate in value.