I imagine like most married couples, we have a joint account we dump $ into to pay the bills. After that, some goes to medical insurance, life insurance, 401K and savings. Once the government is done, whatever's left for each of us goes into our personal accounts. Having personal $ to play with after the bills are paid generally leads to minimal fighting about people spending money. But I digress...
It's not uncommon to treat what's in my personal account as a severe form of petty cash. Since I'm going to waste it anyways, I figured it was time to put some of it to good use.
My friend Mark turned me on to sharebuilder.com, which was recently bought by ING. While there are plenty of money market places online, this one seems to have two great qualities for me: no minimum starting amount, and you can purchase partial stocks since they aggregate. The downside is $9 realtime trades, but only $4 weekly trades that only happen on Tuesdays.
Since I'm the kind of guy to let it ride long term and not buy and sell when the market moves on a daily basis, it works for me.
Now I've got $25 a week going into my ING account to put towards tech funds and such.
If I'm going to waste my petty cash any ways, might as well take a chance on part of it making me money in the long run.
Re:$4 of $25 or of $100
jk2addict on 2008-01-03T18:38:53
In fact, that's exactly what I'm doing. Let the xfers build up for a month or two. possibly a quarter at a time, then invest them. As far as I know, there aren't any yearly fees aside from the initial buy/sell cost, none that I could find on their site, and me friend hasn't encountered any over the last few years.
I'm hoping Zecco starts giving people a run for there money, so the fees drop even more. ING cust a big chunk of the fees right off the bat when they took over ShareBuilder last month.Re:$4 of $25 or of $100
jk2addict on 2008-01-03T18:40:39
Of yeah, I also hit a promo period when I signed up that nets me $50.
