We’re all becoming a little used to watching our investments tick downwards. It’s disheartening at best, but you can take a few steps to protect yourself. You can’t change the value of your investments, but you can reassure yourself that you’ve done everything you can to protect yourself from a problematic market. The three steps [...]

On Tuesday, we covered the left-hand side of a stock quote in Make Sense of Stock Quotes, Part One. In Part Two, we’re tackling the right-hand side — where the good stuff is kept. The statistics listed on this side of a stock quote give a solid indicator of how the stock has performed recently [...]

With the stock market’s fluctuations, many investors are looking for conservative opportunities. If you’re among that group, your first stop should be TreasuryDirect. The federal government operates this site to make investing in the various treasury securities very simple. Those securities include treasury notes, treasury bills, treasury bonds, or TIPS — all of which are [...]

401(k) matching is a wonderful perk — who would ever turn down free money? These days, the answer seems to be ‘a lot of people.’ With the financial difficulties many people are facing, a lot of people have stopped contributing to their 401(k) plan. I can’t say that the choice doesn’t make sense: paying your [...]

With all the opportunities you have to trade stocks online, it’s tempting to just jump into the deep end. We all have a few companies that we’re absolutely sure are on the verge of making it big. It’s worth taking a moment, though, before investing everything in our ’sure thing.’ Take a step back, take [...]

Right now, financial planners are just as scared of an economic crisis as the rest of us. If you work with a financial planner, he or she may be offering up plenty of advice right now that majorly differs from what they’ve told you before. Unfortunately, a lot of that advice may be bad — [...]