Ten Timeless Tips for Wealth Creation - Part II

Follow these time-proven wealth creation steps and watch your personal financial security and wealth grow!Why learn the hard way by losing your hard-earned dollars making the same old common investing mistakes. It's much better to learn from the experience of thousands of investing professionals over the last 100+ years. Here are the top ten timeless investing tips. (See Part I of this article for the other five tips).Don't be overly conservative. If you put all of your money into a 4.5% bank account you are missing out on about 75% of the total annual earnings you can make. Here's the math: if annual inflation is 2.5%, then that 4.5% bank account is only giving you 2% after tax. If, instead, you invest in a well-diversified collection of U.S. and global stocks across a variety of sectors, your long-term risks are nil and your long term average returns will be 8-11%/year. That's 5.5-8.5%/year after inflation is deducted – a heck of a lot more than that savings account! Save money on LED taillights.Keep your investment costs low. Choose no-load mutual funds and low cost index funds whenever possible. The high sales & management fees of many investment vehicles can eat up a significant portion of your annual earnings. Over decades the effect can be very dramatic.Start early. Start investing early in your 20's. By the time you are 60 your money will have been compounding 40 years. The highest growthand returns from compounding come in the later years, and you'll miss out on this if you only invest for 20 years instead of for 40.‘Dollar cost average'. Here's what this strange phrase means: An investment strategy designed to reduce volatility in which securities, typically mutual funds, are purchased in fixed dollar amounts at regular intervals, regardless of what direction the market is moving. Thus, as prices of securities rise, fewer units are bought, and as prices fall, more units are bought. also called constant dollar plan.Buy low, sell high. If you follow dollar cost averaging, you are naturally buying more stock when prices are low. Now all you have to do is follow its corollary – whenever any of your investments appreciates to more than 5% of your portfolio value, sell off enough of that winning investment to bring it back down to 5%. This discipline has the wonderful effect of forcing you to sell some of your winning stocks when they are high, locking in your gains and sticking to your diversification principle.Time has shown that these principles will work with little risk and great returns, so long as you don't freak out on every day's stock market ups and downs. And, best of all, you'll have a unique and invaluable dividend every day of your life – the ‘sleep at night' factor: because your investments are carefully and systematically deployed for the long term in a well-diversified manner, you can live your life focusing on other issues, knowing that your investment account is doing it's job: growing safely and providing for your dreams.