FYInance

Posts Tagged ‘Bonds’

I have some settlement money that I would like to invest in something that will yield good return. Everyone tells me to put it in a mutual fund. Can someone explain to me what exactly a mutual fund is? Will I be able to cash it out whenever, or do I have to keep it in for a certain number of years? Can I buy a mutual fund through Scottrade? What’s the best mutual fund?

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My parents bought me a number of US Savings Bonds when I was a little kid in anticipation of giving them to me as a present when I matured. Well I recently tried to go to a bank and cash them and I was out of luck because not all of the bonds have my name on them, some of them had my mom and some of them had my dads name on there. Some even said PUD and my name. What should I do? Basically my question is that how do you cash a us savings bond when your name is not on it?

Lots of bond talks these days so we decide to discuss something different today. We are going to generally discuss where to invest your money. There are many types of investments. But, in order to invest, you have to have some money that you don’t need first. This is very blunt but if you are starving, of course, you need to spend the money on food first. If you need a home, then of course the money should go towards getting a mortgage or a place to stay first. After all the immediate needs have been taken care of, then you can use the rest of the money (less some emergency cash) to invest.

Before we talk more about what types of investments you should invest in, we asked our readers about what they would do with their money and what they want to invest in. So, let’s throw in the $50,000 cash question to our readers. One reader responded as follows.

What would you do with $50,000 if you had it today?

“If I had $50,000, I would first payoff all of my outstanding credit cards and other bills, purchase two tanks of home heating oil for this coming winter, use some to take a much needed vacation, and then invest the rest of the money. Investing in the stock market is risky so I probably would put the remainder of the money either in a mutual fund or a bond.”

This is a perfect answer. Our reader will first take care of his immediate needs which is to pay off some bills (obviously important to him), make sure his house is warm for the winter. Then when he has some money left over, he would invest. You need to live your life as well and you cannot just spend every last cent you have towards an investment. He also has some knowledge of investment vehicles and yes stocks are riskier than bonds usually. So, investing in bonds or mutual funds would be a good way to start his investments. But, he must make sure that he will not need the money he is investing because most of the time bonds and mutual funds are long term investments. But, he will learn all about that later on from our blog posts. Thank you for sharing everyone. If you want to read more about how to invest your money the smart way, you can check out these resources, http://moneycentral.msn.com and http://www.investingsmart.info.

Today we are going to discuss what bonds are. Let’s start with the basics. Some of you may know bonds as fixed income securities or debt securities because bonds have fixed interest payments.

So, what is a bond?

A bond is another type of investment that you can put your money in (just as you would with stocks). When you buy a bond, you are effectively loaning your money to the bond issuer. In return, the issuer promises to pay you back plus interest payments regularly. Basically, when an (bond) investor loans money to the bond issuer, the issuer must make regular payments of interest for the use of the funds.

Who can issue a bond?

Corporations, municipalities and the US governments are the issuers of bonds. They issue different types of bonds. When a corporation issues a bond, the bond is classified as a corporate bond, for example. Bond issuers issue bonds to raise working capital or funds.

There are many aspects of bonds and bond investing to discuss. We will discuss more about bonds later. For now, if you want to learn about bonds, you can go to http://money.cnn.com, http://www.bloomberg.com, and http://all-about-bonds.info. Next time we discuss bonds we can talk about bond interests, maturities and other important factors you should know when investing in bonds.