Investment Tool Overview

Whether you’ve just got a a 401(k) or you hold an extensive investment portfolio, the Investments tool can help you track and analyze your portfolio performance, adjust your strategy, and determine your allocation.

You’ll be able to quickly get a read on your total investment value and your gains and losses. If you need more detailed information about a specific account — or even a specific holding — you can dive in deeper with just a few clicks.

But isn’t investing hard? And risky?

For those new to investing there can be a bit of a learning curve. Stocks versus bonds? Cost basis? Convertible stocks? There are definitely a few things to learn, but it’s nothing to be afraid of. We’ve designed the Investments tab to be simple. This guide will give you a primer on what you need to know to use this tool.

While there is some risk involved in investing, it’s important to remember that not investing your money is also risky. Money that is just sitting under your mattress or even sitting in a standard savings account loses value over time.

This is due to inflation. A dollar today can buy fewer things than a dollar could last year. In fact, your money will lose anywhere between 2% and 6% of its value every year, and sometimes much more. Ask your grandparents how much it cost to go out for dinner 40 years ago and you’ll see inflation at work.

Investing your money properly not only protects it from inflation, it actually makes you more money than you had before—sometimes quite a bit. It’s important to take a long-term view when investing; there will always be ups and downs, but over the long term there will almost certainly be more ups.

In fact, the average 20-year rolling return on investments in the stock market is more than 11%. Some investments are safer than others, to be sure, and there is always the risk of an economic downturn or a company going broke, but when you look at things in terms of decades rather than days or weeks, you’ll see that investing your money is actually a very good idea. And sometimes an aggressive “risky” strategy is actually the right move.

A key tool for keeping your investments going over the long term is diversity—in other words, investing in lots of different ways, with lots of different investment types, in lots of different industries, etc.

Disclaimer: The functionality of this software varies depending on which financial institution you use. Not all content in this guide will apply to your MoneyMap experience.