If there’s one thing you change about yourself right now, make it that you’ll start investing. Stop throwing your money way on junk you don’t need and that you’ll never use and start buying investments such as stocks and bonds. Don’t waste your money. Make it work for you. Save and invest. That’s the best advice I can give you.

Most likely, if you are not investing yet, you probably don’t know much about investing. Lucky for you, you don’t need an MBA in Finance or even have to know what an MBA is to start investing. If stocks give you headaches and bonds are nothing more than the $50 savings bonds from your Grandma to you, you do have another choice.

Stock investing takes research, and lots of it. Most people aren’t able or willing to put in the amount of time it takes to start effectively investing in stocks. That’s okay, you don’t have to put that much time into it. You can invest in mutual funds. A mutual fund is when many people put their money together and invest it all together. A professional money manager chooses the stocks and bonds to invest in, which ensures diversification.

With that much less work it must cost a fortune, right? Not at all! You can spend a fortune, but you can also save by choosing no-load funds over load funds which charge no fees. They charge no fees, but they can still earn you a lot of money. Usually the extra fees the load funds charge cancel out any extra gain, if there is any.

Load funds can actually earn you less in the long run. They claim that they can earn you more, but even when they do, the fees cancel it out. Often they don’t do any better which means they cost more in the long run.

Stock investing can be risky. If you only have a small amount of money to invest, you are likely to end up only investing in a couple stocks which will greatly increase the risk of your investments. If you only have $1,000 to invest, you can diversify your portfolio automatically by investing in a mutual fund.

Diversifying your stock will decrease risk because if one stock goes down, it’s likely another stock will go up and at least offset it. Basically, you are reducing the risk that your entire portfolio will decrease in value.

Investing in mutual funds is perfect for the ordinary person who doesn’t know much about investing and only has a little bit of money to start investing. Even if you don’t have $1,000 right now, Sharebuilder will let you invest $100 a month in an automatic investment plan until you reach the $1,000 minimum. Start investing right now!