Mutual Funds Minimum Investment

You can get mutual funds from different places. You can get them from mutual fund investment companies, and you can also get mutual funds from your bank and insurance company. No mutual fund is 100 percent risk free, but a money market mutual fund is about as risk free as you can get. Banks can sell mutual funds from different mutual fund families and then charge a commission for selling the funds to their banking customers. Banks may offer mutual funds as an incentive for making new deposits in their bank with a certain minimum of deposit.

With many mutual funds companies you may be able to get mutual funds with minimum investments of $250, $500 and up. You may even luck up and find a mutual fund with a minimum initial investment of $100. If you go online you can find ads that target new investors for a very low minimum initial investment. You will see ads from different families of funds, such as Elfun, GC Capital Markets, and others.

If you look around on the Internet and in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal you will see many kinds of mutual funds with low minimum investments. Most websites and ads in the newspapers have contact information, such as toll free telephone numbers, and a "contact us" link on the websites. You may even see some tutorials for beginners on some sites that you can click on or download into your computer. When you are brand new to investing, you may not want to risk a large amount of money, so it would make sense to start out with a mutual fund that requires a minimum investment.

Once you invest your money into a mutual fund, the professionals take the investing from there. The professionals take your money and combine it with money from all the other investors to invest in stocks, bonds, securities from large companies. When you invest in mutual funds with very low minimum investments your rate of return will be proportionate to the investment you made. Before investing in a certain mutual fund, you should look at its past track record to see how it behaved in the last 12 months. You should also know that past performance does not always mean the future performance will be similar. However, if you see that a mutual fund didn't behave well in the last year, you might want to not waste even a low minimum investment on that fund. Before making new investments, you should consult with a mutual fund advisor, if you aren't quite sure of what to do.