Where to invest my money?

I want to put away 200 dollars every month. Where should I go to invest that? I heard of ira and vanduard but I dont kno what that is and how to start.

Go to an ira, vanguard. Your money grows up as you grow up. haha

go to www.vanguard.com and look around at the links. in general, go to smartmoney.com or money.com and read up on articles about ira's and mutual funds, tons of stuff there

yourself first!

get your own

.ws

CD in a bank

If you are employed, check with your employer to see if there is a 401k plan. If so, the employer may have a matching funds plan. The Human Resources department will have the details. With a 401k, you will be saving before tax dollars. The taxes will be deferred until you begin to withdraw the money at age 59 1/2.
If no 401k, your next best bet is an IRA. Again the taxes are deferred, but you have to remember to deduct IRA savings at tax time.
If you are young and plan on saving for retirement a good mutual fund would be one that tracks the S & P 500 index of large US companies. The fees are very low because the S & P does all of the stock evaluating, at no charge to you.
I own stocks in a S & P Index fund at T Rowe Price. The web address is www.troweprice.com

Invest in no load, low exp, mutual funds with high return rates in the past 10-15 years........there are thousands out there so research. A good magazine on the racks right now is MONEY magazine. It has all the Mutual Fund companies in it with stats.

The most important question you need to ask yourself is "When will I need this money?" Since you asked about IRA, I assume you are thinking about retirement savings.

Your options for retirement saving are generally IRA, Roth IRA or 401K. 401K is the best option if your company offers matching. That is, for every dollar you put it in, your company puts in a dollar. If it's not 1 to 1 matching, then you should invest just enough to get the maximum matching. You just can't beat free money.

If 401K is not an option, Roth IRA is generally considered to be better than IRA. The main advantage is that you can withdraw your investment at anytime with no penalty (not the gain, just what you put in). The main disadvantage of Roth IRA is that the money is taxed before you invest it, versus an IRA where the money is taxed when it is withdrawn. The difference is that you are more likely to be in a lower tax bracket in retirement than today.

You might hear people talk about the advantages of Roth's tax-free growth, but that never made any sense to me. Tax now or tax later makes no difference if the tax rate is the same. For example, if you invest $1000 pretax, it doubles in 10 years to be $2000, then when you withdraw, it gets taxed at say 20%, and becomes $1600. If you invest the same $1000 after 20% tax, or $800, after 10 years it doubles, and becomes the same $1600, tax free. No difference.

Vanguard is a great place to open an IRA or Roth IRA. You can visit http://www.vanguard.com, print out the form for opening an account, and mail in the form with a check. Subsequently, you can set up automatic investment from your bank or even direct deposit from your employer.

As for investment funds, there are many choices, but you can choose one of their Target Retirement funds based on your expected retirement year. It doesn't get any simpler.

There are other great choices, but you're looking for simple, right?

If you have questions, call their customer service number. I've always found them to be extremely helpful.