Wealth and Investing

Wealth - if you want it, then one thing that you need to do is invest the money that you do have, and invest it wisely.

If you want serious wealth, then simply bunging your spare cash in a low interest savings account won't be using it for maximum effect. That said, if you have a low attitude to risk then that is what you will want to do.

Most experts recommend that, if you can afford to put money away for a period of time, that you invest in the stock market. The reason is simple - over an extended period of time, the stock market to date has always weight outperformed things like bonds or cash in terms of total worth of assets over a period of time.

Indeed, over the course of a ten year period, historically shares would be worth more than cash around 90% of the time, so the odds aren't too atrocious.

When it comes to investing in the stock market, you can choose to go for shares or funds; shares in individual companies are the riskiest whilst funds that diversify or track the FTSE or other market are likely to be less risky but there will be some management fees applied.

An index tracking fund is probably perfect for those with little knowledge of the stock market who want to try to reduce their risk a little, and the management fees are usually less on this sort of product.

If you do buy individual companies then try to buy a few and spread the risk across sectors so that if one crashes then you are not going to lose all your money in one fell swoop.