uccess With Money
uccess With Money
Your Personal Guide to Achieving Success With Your Money and Your Life
Very few financial skills are more important than learning how to get unbiased, dependable information. One of the best sources for financial information can be the internet, but it can also be one of the worst! For that reason it is worthwhile to learn how to search financial subjects on the web in a way that enables you to find the good stuff.
Open your browser and do a google search on mutual funds. You will find incredible amounts of information available, many times over what you could read. In fact when I did this I found 27,600,000 references in 0.16 seconds! So you will have to choose carefully what you might want to read.
Notice that the first listings are under Sponsored Links. These are all dot com sites, business sites. They are ready to give you useful information, but they will focus on what will guide you to their funds.
Business sites can provide helpful information but they will always have a business purpose which must be kept in mind. Often it is not what they tell you that is inaccurate, it is what they do not tell you that leaves a distorted impression.
For example, it is very common for them to point out how a solution they offer is much less expensive than several other options, but never mention how you can achieve the same goal somewhere else for much less or even for free.
The first site listed on the nonsponsored list that I got this time was for the article in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This is an excellent source for a lot of good information, but remember that Wikipedia articles can be edited by anyone and can sometimes reflect unusual biases.
For example, you may have noted in the news lately that some politicians have people assigned to checking the articles about them to remove unflattering information and add positive comments. Understand that the same can be done by businesses on many articles to drive business toward their products.
A number of sites are listed that are sponsored by news organizations. Business Week, CNN, and Forbes for example. These could provide up to date information about individual stocks for example. But think about this: the investments that produce news may or may not be the ones that are the wisest for us to invest in.
Furthermore, and it is a sad truth, news stories are not always truthful representations of our world anymore. News organizations are now owned by businesses like General Electric or others and the news often reflects it.
And political bias often carries over into news stories as well, twisting the facts. As I write, news stories often distort reality based on interpretations of the economic times. It is important to check out the opportunities around us looking for real facts and not depend entirely on what we read in the paper or hear on TV.
Number ten on my search happens to be an article called Invest Wisely: An Introduction to Mutual Funds. It proves to be a dot gov page which turns out to be found on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission site.
If you go to this location you will find an excellent consumer oriented study of mutual funds that is especially thorough in pointing out the risks and costs of different types of funds as well as their potential.
http://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/inwsmf.htmThere are two domain extensions to watch for in particular, .gov and .edu. In many cases, government and educational institutions are among the most dependable sources of information.
One type of site is especially devious in nature and consequently requires particular attention. Be especially wary of sites that are designed to recommend the best of any product, especially financial ones, because of the risk they pose. They are often biased or even dishonest.
Many of these sites seem to be fronts for people in the business area concerned. They may even have names that sound like consumer organization but they are really just promoting their own products, sometimes including several brands grouped together.
Others are sites of affiliate marketers who gain money when someone purchases a product through their site. These are not inherently bad sites. Some are helpful. But others are outright scams. The point is just to be extra careful when checking out these sources.
Try searching for several financial subjects and looking over the returns to evaluate which sites might give the most helpful information. Think about potential bias for each one.
Click on the “advanced search” button and try searching after adding a specific domain selection. Try searching one at a time using .edu, .gov, and .info domains to see the different results. Look at a few sites and try to evaluate the information's bias.
