If you have a reasonable mortgage rate, do not pay your mortgage off early. For example, if you made an extra $1000 payment toward your mortgage principle, you are saving the interest at say, 9 percent for the rest of the years of the mortgage.

I'm no expert in this, but after you've opened up a mutual fund account and made your first investment, review your net worth. Make sure you have the proper vehicles in place to assist your heirs. This includes: life insurance to cover inheritance taxes, wills & trusts, and maintaining an organized list of asset information. This list should contain information on all

Please ask more people, preferably experts or finance books, about these topics. They is important and must be addressed if you don't want to burden your heirs.

Steady periodic (monthly) investments should be made for more than 5 years, preferably longer. This method of investing is called dollar-cost-averaging. Even if it is $50 per month, this puts you ahead of most people and soon will realize what a great move you made.

1. Depending on the mutual fund company, the automatic deduction commitment sometimes allows a customer to deposit a lesser amount for the minimum initial investment. This is good because you may not have or want to invest the several thousands of dollars that some mutual fund companies ask for a minimum initial investment. Sometimes the minimum subsequent investments are reduced too. In my list of financial links, I will give you a mutual fund company that has NO minimum investment constraint.

2. The auto-deduction from you bank account forces you to do a very savvy thing with your investment. Periodic (monthly) investments provide one of the best methods of investing your money.
3. You don't have to write a check every month.

The fine-tuning actions will become important if you have large sums of money to manage or have special family situations. I recommend you hiring a financial advisor at that point. The advice I give about buying stock mutual funds is a "do now, followup and learn more later" strategy to get you going before you regret missing out on time.

Turnover is a number associated with a mutual fund which demonstrates how often investments are bought and sold. Generally, the more investments are bought and sold, the more capital gains are being accrued in the mutual fund. Since you recieve your share of these gains each year, you are responsible for paying taxes on them.

It is best to postpone paying taxes on your investments to allow the money to work for you in the meantime. By investing in a mutual fund that has a low turnover, say 80% or less (warning: that is my personal guess), you are benefitting from keeping investment dollars invested instead of giving some to Uncle Sam too soon.

Withdrawing isn't always as easy as asking for your money. Well, at least getting money is easy, but the taxes sometimes are not. Before you withdraw, learn the tax implications and strategies based on your situation.