Some questions about investing [duplicate]
What is the best form of investment? It only depends on your goals... The perfect amount of money depends also on your particular situation. The first thing you should start getting familiar with is the notion of portfolio and diversification. Managing risk is also fundamental especially with the current market funkiness... Start looking at index based ETFs -Exchange Traded Funds- and Balanced Mutual Funds to begin with. Many discounted online brokerage companies in the USA offer good training and knowledge centers. Some of them will also let you practice with a demo account that let you invest virtual money to make you feel comfortable with the interface and also with investing in general.
"This answer is somewhat incomplete as I don't have definitive conclusions about some parts of your question.  Your question includes some very specific subquestions that may best be answered by contacting the investment companies you're considering. I don't see any explicit statement of fees for TIAA-CREF either.  I suggest you contact them and ask. There is mention on the site of no-transaction-fee funds (NTF), but I wasn't able to find a list of such funds.  Again, you might have to ask. Vanguard also offers some non-Vanguard funds without transaction fees.  If you go the Vanguard page on other mutual funds you can use the dropdown on the right to select other fund companies.  Those with ""NTF"" by the name have no transaction fees. Scottrade also offers NTF funds.  You can use their screener and select ""no load"" and ""no transaction fee"" as some of your filters. You are correct that you want to choose an option that will offer a good lineup of funds that you can buy without transaction fees.  However, as the links above show, Vanguard and TIAA-CREF are not the only such options.  My impression is that almost any firm that has their own funds will sell them (or at least some of them) to you without a transaction fee.  Also, as shown above, many places will sell you other companies' funds for free too.  You have plenty of options as far as free trades, so it really depends on what funds you like. If you google for IRA providers you will find more than you can shake a stick at.  If you're interested in low-cost index funds, Vanguard is pretty clearly the leader in that area as their entire business is built around that concept.  TIAA-CREF is another option, as is Fideltiy (which you didn't mention), and innumerable others.  Realistically, though, you probably don't need a gigantic lineup of funds.  If you're juggling money between more than a handful of funds, your investment scheme is probably needlessly complex.  The standard advice is to decide on a broad allocation of money into different asset classes (e.g., US stocks, US bonds, international stocks, international bonds), find a place that offers funds in those areas with low fees and forget about all the other funds." Financial advisers like to ask lots of questions and get nitty-gritty about investment objectives, but for the most part this is not well-founded in financial theory.  Investment objectives really boils down to one big question and an addendum.  The big question is how much risk you are willing to tolerate.  This determines your expected return and most characteristics of your portfolio. The addendum is what assets you already have (background risk).  Your portfolio should contain things that hedge that risk and not load up on it.  If you expect to have a fixed income, some extra inflation protection is warranted.  If you have a lot of real estate investing, your portfolio should avoid real estate.  If you work for Google, you should avoid it in your portfolio or perhaps even short it. Given risk tolerance and background risk, financial theory suggests that there is a single best portfolio for you, which is diversified across all available assets in a market-cap-weighted fashion. "Probably not, though there are a few things to be said for understanding what you are doing here.  Primerica acts as an independent financial services firm and thus has various partners that specialize in various financial instruments and thus there may exist other firms that Primerica doesn't use that could offer better products.  Now, how much do you want to value your time as it could take more than a few months to go through every possible insurance firm and broker to see what rate you could get for the specific insurance you want.  There is also the question of what constitutes best here.  Is it paying the minimal premiums before getting a payout?  That would be my interpretation though this requires some amazing guesswork to know when to start paying a policy to pay out so quickly that the insurance company takes a major loss on the policy. Similarly, there are thousands of mutual funds out there and it is incredibly difficult to determine which ones would be best for your situation.  How much risk do you want to take?  How often do you plan to add to it?  What kind of accounts are you using for these investments, e.g. IRAs or just regular taxable accounts?  Do tax implications of the investments matter? Thus, I'd likely want to suggest you consider this question: How much trust do you have that this company will work well for you in handling the duty of managing your investments and insurance needs?  If you trust them, then buy what they suggest.  If you don't, then buy somewhere else but be careful about what kind of price are you prepared to pay to find the mythical ""best"" as those usually only become clear in hindsight. When it comes to trusting a company in case, there are more than a few factors I'd likely use: Questions - How well do they answer your questions or concerns from your perspective?  Do you feel that these are being treated with respect or do you get the feeling they want to say, ""What the heck are you thinking for asking that?"" in a kind of conceited perspective. Structure of meeting - Do you like to have an agenda and things all planned out or are you more of the spontaneous, ""We'll figure it out"" kind of person?  This is about how well do they know you and set things up to suit you well. Tone of talk - Do you feel valued in having these conversations and working through various exercises with the representative?  This is kind of like 1 though it would include requests they have for you. Employee turnover - How long has this person been with Primerica?  Do they generally lose people frequently?  Are you OK with your file being passed around like a hot potato?  Not that it necessarily will but just consider the possibility here. Reputation can be a factor though I'd not really use it much as some people can find those bad apples that aren't there anymore and so it isn't an issue now.  In some ways you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you.  There are more than a few companies that want to get a piece of what you'll invest, buy, and use when it comes to financial products so it may be a good idea to shop around a little." "The first question I have to ask is, why would your ""friend"" even be considering something so ridiculous?  There are so many variations of the banking scam running around, and yet people can't seem to see them for what they are -- scams.   The old saying ""there's no such thing as a free lunch"" really comes into play here.  Why would anyone send you/your friend $3,000.00 just because they ""like you""?  If you can't come up with a rational answer to that question then you know what you (or your friend) should do -- walk away from any further contact with this person and never look back! Why?  Well, the simple answer is, let's assume they DO send you $3,000.00 by some means.  If you think there aren't strings attached then all hope is lost.  This is a confidence scam, where the scammer wins your trust by doing something nobody would ever do if they were trying to defraud you.  As a result, you feel like you can trust them, and that's when the games really begin.   Ask yourself this -- How long do you think it will be (even assuming the money is sent) before they'll talk you into revealing little clues about yourself that allow them to develop a good picture of you?  Could they be setting you up for some kind of identity theft scheme, or some other financial scam?  Whatever it is, you'd better believe the returns for them far outweigh the $3,000.00 they're allegedly going to send, so in a sense, it's an investment for them in whatever they have planned for you down the road. PLEASE don't take the warnings you get about this lightly!!!  Scams like this work because they always find a sucker.  The fact that you're asking the question in the first place means you/your ""friend"" are giving serious thought to what was proposed, and that's nothing short of disaster if you do it.   Leave it be, take the lesson for what it's worth before it costs you one red cent, and move on. I hope this helps. Good luck!" "You've asked eleven different questions here.  Therefore, The first thing I'd recommend is this: Don't panic. Seek answers to your questions systematically, one at a time.  Search this site (and others) to see if there are answers to some of them.  You're in good shape if for no other reason than you're asking these when you're young. Investing and saving are great things to do, but you also have time going for you.  I recommend that you use your ""other eight hours per day"" to build up other income streams.  That potentially will get you far more than a 2% deposit. Any investment can be risky or safe.  It depends on both your personal context and that of the larger economy.  The best answers will come from your own research and from your advisors (since they will be able to see where you are financially, and in life)." "Let me start by giving you a snippet of a report that will floor you. Beat the market? Investors lag the market by so much that many call the industry a scam.   This is the 2015 year end data from a report titled Quantitive Analysis of Investor Behavior by a firm, Dalbar. It boggles the mind that the disparity could be this bad. A mix of stocks and bonds over 30 years should average 8.5% or so. Take out fees, and even 7.5% would be the result I expect. The average investor return was less than half of this. Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard, and considered the father of the index fund, was ridiculed. A pamphlet I got from Vanguard decades ago quoted fund managers as saying that ""indexing is a path to mediocrity."" Fortunately, I was a numbers guy, read all I could that Jack wrote and got most of that 10.35%, less .05, down to .02% over the years. To answer the question: psychology. People are easily scammed as they want to believe they can beat the market. Or that they'll somehow find a fund that does it for them. I'm tempted to say ignorance or some other hint at lack of intelligence, but that would be unfair to the professionals, all of which were scammed by Madoff. Individual funds may not be scams, but investors are partly to blame, buy high, sell low, and you get the results above, I dare say, an investor claiming to use index funds might not fare much better than the 3.66% 30 year return above, if they follow that path, buying high, selling low. Edit - I am adding this line to be clear - My conclusion, if any, is that the huge disparity cannot be attributed to management, a 6.7% lag from the S&P return to what the average investor sees likely comes from bad trading. To the comments by Dave, we have a manager that consistently beats the market over any 2-3 year period. You have been with him 30 years and are clearly smiling about your relationship and investing decision. Yet, he still has flows in and out. People buy at the top when reading how good he is, and selling right after a 30% drop even when he actually beat by dropping just 22%. By getting in and out, he has a set of clients with a 30 year record of 6% returns, while you have just over 11%. This paragraph speaks to the behavior of the investor, not managed vs indexed." "Do I need an Investment Adviser?  No, but you may want to explore the idea of having one. Is he going to tell me anything that my accountant can't?  Probably. How much expertise are you expecting from your accountant here? Do you think your accountant knows everything within the realms of money from taxes, insurance products, investments and all your choices and what would work or wouldn't? Seems like it could be a tall order to my mind. My accountant did say to come to him for advice on investment/business   issues. So, he is willing, but is he able? Not asking about his   competence, but rather ""is there something that only an Investment   Adviser can provide, by law, that an accountant can't""? Not that I know though don't forget how much expertise are you expecting here from one person. Is this person intended to answer all your money questions? But isn't that something that my accountant could/should do? Perhaps though how well are you expecting one person to be aware of so much stuff? I want you to know all the tax law so I can minimize taxes, maximize my investment returns, cover me with adequate insurance, and protect my savings seems like a bit much to put on one entity. Do I need either of them? Won't the Internet and sites like this one   suffice? Need no. However, how much time are you prepared to spend learning the basics of strategies that work for you? How much money are you prepared to put into things to learn what works and doesn't? While it is your decision, consider how to what extent do you diagnose your medical issues through the internet versus going to see a doctor? Be careful of how much of a do it yourself approach you want to go here and recognize that there are multiple approaches that may work. The question is which trade-offs are OK for you." True on the second point. It is information based. My bad.  With regard to the first point, I don't think he's Jesus returned. He makes plenty of mistakes but he does provide the return record of a very disparate group of investors following the same method. That method may not work anymore (hard to say) but I think it does. I'm obviously a true believer.   With respect to third point, I don't think you were being a dick. Enjoyed the debate. Thanks for the perspective