Investment tool!

Investing has always seemed a little scary for me... so many big words and so many variables! 

We personally ended up in a bit of a pickle over some bad investment advice, and are still paying the consequences of our decision.  In order to avoid the same mistake again, we've done our best to talk to lots of different people, researched things online, and have done our best to just get a general education on what investments are and how they work. 

There is a fantastic site that we learned of in the last week, that gives you the ability to check out how funds, companies, and stocks have been doing for the last few years.  If you have bought into a stock or other fund like that, you will have an ID number of some sort on that fund.  Using The Globe and Mail's website, you can enter the name of any stock or fund into their search bar near the top of the window, and use the tabs on the fund's page to view information on the fund.  Most importantly, you can view how well the fund has performed in the last 10 years, and then make a solid decision on whether or not you want to get in. 

I'm told that when investment brokers are showing charts, they can easily (and legally) leave some information out of the picture and make their graphs look rather rosy.  The Globe and Mail tells it how it is.  Good or bad, it's the real picture.

If we had looked at those charts before we invested, we may not have been so easily convinced to buy in.  Thankfully, we are learning much more now and will not make those mistakes again. 

As Dave Ramsey says, "Never buy into something that you can't explain- something you don't understand well enough to explain it to a 7th grader."