How to plan for Your child's SHS/Tertiary Education

Education is undoubtedly the key to success in every endeavor in today’s world. Many a parent is pouring their monies into making sure their children join the elites. But the problem that is arising these days is the cost of funding their children’s education. The problems get worse when those parents have not made any provision for such future cost. Below are the ways that parents must use to stop such situation in their lives.

Determine how much it will cost

 Taking your child’s education as an enterprise will help you to plan ahead. Children are in continual growth and as a parent you need to meet every cost that goes with their growth. This means you must plan how much it will cost you to see your ward through college. You can do this by researching on the fees those schools charge today. You knowing how much they charge today and projecting into future will help you determine the cost.

Identify the strategy that suit you best

After you been able to determined how much it will cost you , the next things is to look for ways you will adopt to help you achieve  that objective. Mostly, in investment like this, there are two major strategies that you can adopt. These are; you can make full down payment (lump sum payment) into the set account or use monthly or daily investing. These strategies are very optional base on your financial status.  

The various means to apply your strategy

Money market and Certificate of Deposit: this means require that you buy a certificate/coupon for a period of time. They come with penalties if you want to withdraw (redeem) it before the stipulated time. The money market has different redemption dates – from 3months to 6months and a year and more. The certificate of deposit has a specific period upon purchase.

Savings Account: you can also consider saving in your bank.  This is the easiest of all the ways to keep money for the future. This account allows you to earn interest on your money but they are usually very small.

Stocks/Shares:  Buying stocks/Shares from any stock market will help you save for your child’s education. They are long-term in nature and they require more years to realize its returns in full. But in the interim, you will see the movement of the price of the stock. There are several stocks to choose from on the stock exchanges.

Mutual funds: the easiest means to invest for your child’s education is to choose mutual funds. Mutual funds give you great dual benefit, thus, easy withdrawal and professional management. The mutual funds allow for all the strategies I stated above.  Mostly, they do not require huge amount of money to start investing in them.

Life Insurance:  This investing product is not of exception to those mentioned. In this type of investment you put away specific amount of money into it for someday. Though, these monies can be received when going on pension. Some of them allow you to borrow against your investment and these borrowed monies can sort out those educational cost.  

Should your child be left out of the equation?

I personally think children are our greatest asset whom we will entrust our estates to and they need to know enough to apply in their lives. Statistics shows that children who partake in their educational funding take their studies serious.  You must get your children involve in their educational funding. This can be done through little savings they will be making out of their allowances, odd jobs or gifts they receive. Let them use those monies to buy some of their educational needs.

Five Misconceptions About Investing in The World Today

The moment we conceive an idea to do something then the devil fear set in trying as much as it could to calm our enthusiasm to get it done. Investing is not of exception as new investors do hear more about risk and other uncertainties the stock market poses to its investors. These commentaries have clouded most people’s mind to extend that  they have developed misconceptions about stock market investing. This has resulted in people developing  a lot of alibis for investing and in effect deny them of the biggest wealth creation platform in the world. The following are some of the misconceptions we have developed all this while.

The 5 Five Secrets That Every Successful Investor knows, but you don’t

By Asante Isaac

More often we get confuse about the amount of information we read online and offline on investing. At times we start and get stack at some point but to our surprise we will see others succeeding massively on the same platform. This could compel us to ask ourselves why, why others are succeeding and we’re not. The secret here is to learn what they do either be like them or outperform them through your ingenuity. Here are few learning curves you can adapt from the successful investors.

1.      Leveraging small beginning: The successful investors do leverage the power within starting small. They use this power to learn through the loses the might incur in the initial stages of their investing journey. Every starter in investing has great hopes and dreams of being successful soon but the fact is the reverse. The successful investors knowing these will not dig deep at the onset but first test their knowledge in gradual process.

2.      See Knowledge as key: As a newbie, never think you can easily outperform the market in short period. The reason being that as a starter you do not have sufficient knowledge as the experience investor so, always invest in investments you truly have enough information on and nothing else. The successful investors do not compromise on knowledge acquisition. In this regards, they always acquaint themselves with necessary information about what to invest in. Those information they finished themselves with help them to figure out where their risk might be as well as how they might lose money.

3.       Understand Time brings success: The enthusiasm new investors have about the market is so great that they turn to believe they will get success so soon. The rich investors avoid this get rich quick scheme because a strong desire for money will make you lose huge money without knowing. It takes time for everyone to gain experience on any market and only those who are more experience easily win the market. As new investor, allow time to gain experience before you can win the market as the rich investors.

4.      They love History: There is a popular saying that history does repeat itself and it is true with investing. In 2006, the housing market was very expensive but slammed down to its lowers in 2008 and even worse in 2009. The secret here is the rich investors made enormous money in 2008 and 2009 because everybody was selling and the rich were buying. In investing, you only make money when you buy an investment but not when you sell. What you can do here is to prepare for the next cycle and join the wagon.

5.      Trust their instinct: Nature being fair gave each and everyone emotional signal that help us to determine the good and the bad of everything we do. Any investment rich investor feel are not right or have doubt about, they will not invest in but by pass. The fact is, any success you gain on the market ignite your emotion of happiness so also you losing could affect you as well. In view of this, make sure you are sure of every move before you commit yourself.

The more experience you become will help you avoid many pitfalls in the world of investing. All you need most is to be open-minded and keep researching