Comment by Vitaly Indinko on March 24, 2010 at 4:57pm

8% is a pretty good return. Not unreasonable as the stock market is generally cited as returning 11% over time, but I'm not sure we're still in that era.

Comment by lea on March 25, 2010 at 1:07am

Hard to know. Yes, we just went through a craptastic period where a lot of growth from the past decade was wiped out, but now we are seeing good growth again. Terrible view from a one or two year perspective, but maybe not so bad from a 40 or 50 year perspective.

Then again, a lot of past growth was based on a growing country with lots of cheap energy available. We live in a different world now where energy prices are going to limit the bottom line. Of course there could be a major discovery that brings the return of cheap energy to our economies.

Also, I don't think we really understand how the digital economy will influence future performance. There are some negatives in our future economic outlook, but there also are some positives.

No matter what the return rate turns out to be, it is a good idea to keep saving and investing each month. I try to invest in index funds to keep my costs low and my risk spread wide. I tried to invest in individual companies for a few years, but the effort wasn't worth it. I did learn a lot though about investing and how the markets work. I guess I learned enough to understand that I will never be able to accurately predict individual stock prices. There are too many factors and too many insiders who have enogh holdings to make major moves that can negatively effect small investors with no warning.

I hope to find economic security by investing every month into index funds while trying to hit it big by investing in my own businesses instead of someone else's.

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