Unique Educational Toys – Benefits of Choosing the Ideal Toy for Your Growing Child

With a world full of advanced gadgetry, as well as increased technology literacy, you can come to expect the marriage of toys and education. There are many ways that educational toys have become a big part of our society today, anywhere from interactive programs to stimulating educational baby toys. What wonders technology can do for the development of children!

Though not everyone sees education and interactivity as a good thing, studies show that educational toys for infants act as stimuli for their growing brain. If you give a child who is in his first six years of life a wide array of toys with a variety of difficulties, the brain begins to create new neurological pathways for thoughts to be carried out faster. This means that essentially your child develops problem-solving, visual, as well as special recognition abilities from early on. Some of the best educational toys also improve reading skills, hand eye coordination, math skills as well as fine motor skills. Think of these toys as a brain gym for kids except it is much more fun and engaging, not to mention emotionally rewarding.

It is best to start cultivating your child’s natural talents while they are still young, as infants they are open to a wider array of skill sets which if not developed could be lost. Some children even develop new skills from toys which stimulate their brains or require certain ways of approaching a problem.

But what exactly embodies a toy made to develop the minds of a younger generation? Also, what exactly makes a toy the ideal educational toy? One of the most important things would be selecting a toy that is age appropriate. No matter how much you try you can’t force a one year old to learn the 12 multiplication tables, now can you?

Color is essential, they create a stimulating and exciting atmosphere for the child preferably nice bright colors as they attract the eye more than dull washed out colors. Try getting a toy that is mentally stimulating, this can be anywhere from a set of alphabet blocks to a mat of numbers and shapes. The key is getting big, bold and bright things as this draws in the child’s attention.

Though all of the above would be meaningless if you as the parent do not interact with your child. Toys holding an educational value are meant to be used with the parent to support and encourage the child. Often a child does better with encouragement and support, just remember the difference between support and playing the game for them as this defeats the purpose of their toys if you play the game for them. No matter how busy you are, try to spend at least five to ten minutes with your child to help them get started. In fact, for even further encouragement it might be ideal to bring them to an educational toy store near you to see what kind of unique educational toys that they may be interested in for themselves.

Home Based Business Ideas – Promote Work At Home Opportunities

Niche marketing is a very popular way to make money online today. One of the best home based business ideas is to promote work at home opportunities to people looking for ways to make money.

Think about why this would be a good niche to be in.

1. You never run out prospects. We know this is true because millions of people go online every day and Google search keyword phrases such as home business, work at home, earn money online, and so on.

Many of these are people who are coming on the Internet for the first time. Their circumstances have changed and they need to find ways to make money.

Others are people who have tried to make money with other ideas and it has not worked out for them. They are now in the market for a new home based business idea and are receptive to something that might work for them.

2. You can build a mailing list with this target market. You do this by offering free information on how to start a home based business.

The information you are offering will be traded for their name and email address. All you really need to do this is a landing page, or a sign-up form on all of your web pages.

You can store the information in an autoresponder and deliver it instantly when the customer subscribes through your sign-up form. Once you have their name and email address this becomes an asset for your own business.

These are a couple of ways you can promote work at home opportunities to a targeted niche and use it as a home based business idea for yourself.

The Truth Why So Many Home Based Businesses Fail

Are you someone that has had monumental dreams only to have them crushed because things didn’t turn out like you expected? Or to be more specific, have you had a friend, relative, or even a stranger pitch you on an opportunity and tells you it is the end all be all of business opportunities?If you haven’t, then consider yourself lucky. Because I have had it happen to me more times then I care to share. The reason I ask that is it really sets up having a home-based business in a negative light. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of scams out there. But you if know who you are dealing from the beginning then it can save you a lot of head aches later.See from my point of view people don’t get a true picture of all the benefits a home-based business has to offer. I know what it is like to have huge expectation because of all the hype. Only to find out later, that a opportunity wasn’t anything like I pictured. But what if I had been told the whole truth?People that hype things up for a buck have much bigger problems then making money, if you know what I mean. I really believe in painting a realistic picture for people, otherwise I don’t have anything to offer. Because if I am real, then I have to be able to back up all I say right?So to give you a more honest perspective of what it takes to have a successful home-based business looks more like this. There are people that have made millions in a month’s time, but it is not likely going to be you, at least for a while. People can push a button and make millions, but it takes time, knowledge and a whole lot of experience to do it.There are many factors to consider when looking at a home-based business. It is realistic to achieve a multiple six to seven figure income working from home if all the needed elements are there. The most important thing to consider when looking for the right home-base business is the person who is going to lead you. Otherwise you could end up in no man’s land.When choosing an opportunity there some very important factors to consider. Trust me on this, I have been around the block a time or two. Again the first thing is who will be leading you? The other things to look at are:o Does it have more then one way to generate money?
o Is there training that will teach everything needed?
o What kind of compensation plan does it have?
o How solid is the company?Obviously, these are just a few, but you get the direction I am headed. See another thing is who else knows about it and what do they think?I want to share some of the awesome benefits of having a home-based business:o Waking up and not punching someone else’s clock
o Spending more time with your loved ones
o Being taxed after you spend rather then being taxed before you spend
o Huge tax benefits on your utilities and many other things
o Building something for you, rather then for someone else
o And many, many, many, moreFriends times have changed and they way we generate an income has to change too. Learning how money works and how to get it to work for you is a priceless thing.Gigantic department stores are shutting down for two reasons. First one is obviously the economy, but the other reason is overlooked. It is because distribution of products are changing. More and more home-base business are coming in to the market place, because they can do the same thing as the big anchor stores at a fraction of the cost.I highly recommend you read Made in America, the story about Sam Walton. It is truly and amazing demonstration of huge shift in how retail changed. And it is about to change again.Do you want to be a part of the largest industry that has hit this planet since the dot com boom?

MLM Home Based Business – A No Brainer Explanation

You are one of the many people who have read on the subject of MLM companies in the newspapers, seen a TV advertisement or just came across of one of the thousands of MLM products.Are you still wondering what exactly this phrase refers to? MLM refers to Multi Level Marketing which offers products and by joining them you can earn money literally from the comfort of your home.The Multi Level Marketing business form has a long story of producing millionaires. As various other people proved, it is still doable to earn a significant amount of profits even if someone joins nowadays to any of the companies. The reality is that a large amount of the success stories online are coming from MLM business.Though you can’t get rich overnight you can see the examples that has been set up for you. This is the only business model which capable of creating the income which correlates the energy and work you invest in it. This what so many people in MLM already know of. They have done their homework. They made the initial investment since you have to invest before you can to gain the benefits of your preferred MLM group both from their products and payouts.Multi level marketing has numerous layers where you earn after people you refer. As time goes by you will become skilled at how to work together with people who have found their goals by joining you. By starting a home based business you will not only have the benefit of earning wealth from the comfort of your home and learning about your company and products but you will also learn how to connect with people and how to market.Joining MLM is also a great way to refine your communication skills and learn a lot more concerning people. By doing so you will able to like the feeling of helping others. This business is not the same for each person. To start with you should find a company you can be involved with. It can be a software producing, focused at cleansing, info product or nourishment product selling company. The possibilities are nearly endless but you have to find something which fits your lifestyle and interests.You will study a lot on the way. Tremendous amount of information waiting for you and there are many skills you can master. The decision is yours.By operating a profitable home based business you will gain more knowledge than you can ever imagine.You have to decide and dedicate yourself. You will learn that there are tons of MLM companies and you will surely find the one which you need. It’s not the company which will make you successful but yourself although the products will give you confidence to take on the task in front of you.If you really want learn how to be successful in the MLM home based business it will require your enthusiasm. You will need to do your own work and exploration. Don’t get sidetracked until you attain your final goal the complete financial success.

“How to Find the Top Online Home Based Business?” Part 1 – Advantages of a Home Based Business

The internet has evolved from an information gateway to a money- making machine. Millionaires are created week after week made possible by the unlimited boundaries of the internet. Good Home Based Businesses and products are designed in a way that it sells internationally. That way it becomes recession proof and target market is not limited to location. A bigger percentage of individuals from young entrepreneurs to retired individuals coming from all sorts of classes would rather venture into an online- home based business rather than a brick and mortar business. Why so? RISK! Advantages of Home Based Business:1. Lesser Risk- A good Home Based Business takes much less startup cash than a freestanding business, or even a franchise location. I even came across a few out of many that even offer a 365 days money back if you dont make a profit. I guarantee you, you will never find this offer from any franchise business.2. Personal Freedom- Freedom from traffic, rush hour, office politics, clock in, clock out, deadlines, stress, recession and everything else that comes with the package of a monthly fixed paycheck. About 3.3 million Americans travel 50 miles or more one way to get to work – and they commute these distances 329 million times a year, according to National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) findings released Wednesday, May 12, 2004 by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. I wonder what the numbers are for this year.
 
3. Quality Time- This is especially important for parents of school-age children: You can see your kids grow and help develop the right values and character for your kids. Most teenagers are influenced by peers and media because their role models are too busy with work. Basically your travel time plus your work time would be the time away from your family.4. Tax Advantages- Any business owner would agree that tax laws for business owners are way better than the way employees are taxed. We all know that even overtime is taxed, unless your not really paying attention to your payslip. When your run your business at home. You can deduct a part of your home’s operating and depreciation expenses on your home as business expenses such as mortgage, property taxes, insurance, utilities, and/or the expenses of household maintenance.5. Increased Productivity- Now that you have control over your own time, you can set aside time to increase your personal value through education. Read personal development books, attend millionaire workshops, hang out with sef made millionaires and learn from them. Your having fun socializing while adding value to yourself.Now that you know the advantages of starting an online business, you will want to know how to find a Home Based Business that fits you and what it takes to succeed. 

Christian Home Based Business – How Do You Get Started?

Starting a Christian home based business is very appealing to a lot of people. They dream about having the freedom and flexibility that working from home offers. And they sincerely want to share God’s love through a Christian home based business. It is so exciting in the planning and dreaming stages.But then the reality of it all sets in. “How do I do this?” and “What do I do first?” are common questions from people. They may stop before they even get started because it all seems too confusing and overwhelming.If you have been on the internet for any length of time, I am sure you have encountered ads about businesses that sound too good to be true, so how do you tell if something is legitimate or not?Do any of these ring a bell with you? If so, you are not alone. Starting a Christian home based business is very doable and can be very rewarding, if you go about it the right way. I don’t like to see businesses there one day and gone the next because the owner just didn’t get the help they needed.There are some essential steps to take to ensure a successful business, like doing your research and choosing something that you really love and have some ability in. But so often, people skip these steps and just jump in. This is not the way to go about it.When running any business, whether it is home based or a brick and mortar type business, there will be dry times. Many businesses that sell things make the majority of their income around Christmas time. So, what about the other ten or eleven months of the year? You have to keep the business going, so it is important to pick something you will enjoy whether you are making tons of money or not.Let’s say you are able to choose a business and get it up online. Now comes the challenging part. How do people find you? What can you do to get the word out that won’t break the bank? Did you know there are all kinds of free effective ways to market a business?A Christian home based business can bring purpose and fulfillment to your life, and it can benefit others in an eternal way. Just make sure you are starting it out on the right foot so it can last for many years to come.

The Best Home Based Business

What is the best home based business? This is a question that I am sure gets asked on forums and social networking sites throughout the web 1000s of times on a daily basis. What is the best home based business?It sounds like a simple question but the answer is far more complicated than the question. There are numerous factors that can influence the answer to that question. What is the definition of the best? Does the best mean the one that makes the most money, or the one that gives you the most free time, or the one that you can fit around your daily routine?If you are work from home mom, then you need a business that you can fit around the kids. Money is important to you but not as important as time. You need a business that fits in with school runs etc. If you are a young guy then money is probably more important to you than time. You don’t mind spending 16 hours a day on your home based business if you are earning 5k per week.So the best business home based business is only the best if it fits what the individual is looking for in a home based business. Another factor that needs to be taken into account is the cost to set up the business. Most home based businesses can be set up with 100s rather than 100s of pounds. Does the start up costs reflect the earning potential of the business? Is it true that the more you invest in your home based business the more money you are likely to make. I don’t think so, but a business that is started with a few 100 pounds is going to have limitations. At some point you are going to need to re invest more money to grow the business to the stage where it is making 1000s per week.I have started and been involved in many home based businesses, and the best one as far as I am concerned is currency trading, or Forex trading as most people know it. This is a home based business with relatively low start up costs, and it has the potential to make you a lot of money, and the hours are very flexible, so it is suitable for everyone. Its not an easy business to get into though and you have to spend a lot of time studying and learning how to trade correctly. You can do this on your own via the internet. There is lots of free information out there on Forex trading. Or if you want to fast track your learning you can employ a Forex mentor, or join a live trading room.

The Three “Rs” of Real Estate Investing

Expert real estate investors, Rick McKinnon and Leslie Quinsay, have a property portfolio that proves anyone can still make a fortune by investing in real estate. McKinnon’s and Quinsay’s new book, R3: Real People with Real Strategies for Real-Estate Investing: Developing the Mindset for Success, explains their strategy in words that even a layman can understand and shows you how their proprietary strategies can work even in today’s unstable economy.

The three “Rs” of real estate investing include Real people (with the right attitudes), Real strategies (for investing in this or any other real estate market) and the basics of smart investing (how to make the actual decisions that will build your wealth). Rick’s and Leslie’s book is a fascinating read – peppered with personal tidbits and incredible insights that will change your thinking about purchasing real estate to ensure your financial success.

Rick and Leslie are friends, business partners and co-authors who inspire each other to succeed. Together, they’ve written R3: Real People with Real Strategies for Real-Estate Investing in an effort to help others achieve what they know is possible from their own successes. Rick is president of Real Estate Investment Solutions, a consulting firm that focuses on helping others identify real-estate investment opportunities. Leslie is president of Meridian Commercial Investments Inc. and her expertise is the acquisition, management and development of real estate and turning them into excellent investments.

Together, McKinnon and Quinsay have written a unique and informative “how-to” book that can teach anyone the strategies for developing a winning mindset necessary for successful real estate investing. Unlike most how-to books, R3: Real People with Real Strategies for Real-Estate Investing doesn’t read like a text book. Rather, it’s a book that not only focuses on the successes to be had – but also mistakes that can happen and how you can learn from them.

When it comes to any type of investing, the more knowledge you have access to – the better chance you’ll have for success. In Quinsay’s and McKinnon’s book you’ll learn the advantages of “property passion,” building a mindset that will bring you success, how to build your portfolio and where the best investment bargains can be found.

Rick and Leslie also include chapters in R3: Real People with Real Strategies for Real-Estate Investing about how to evaluate property and what to look for in financing and joint ventures. Property and tenant management are important aspects of real estate investing and McKinnon and Quinsay give you a clear cut plan for success in those areas.

You’ll also learn how to build a team of success-oriented people to help you achieve your dreams of financial triumphs. And R3: Real People with Real Strategies for Real-Estate Investing: Developing the Mindset for Success doesn’t leave you there. Rick McKinnon and Leslie Quinsay provide clear cut directives in their book that will put you on the path of growing wealth beyond your dreams.

The Costs of Passive Fund Investing

There are many options for buying a group of securities in one product. The most popular ones are mutual funds, segregated funds and exchange traded funds. What they have in common is that these products are an easy way to buy a group of securities at once instead of buying each security individually. The fund can also proportion the securities so you the individual investor does not have to. There are two main classifications for what type of fund you can purchase in terms of costs. It is important to know how these costs work so you can avoid paying too much for this convenience. These products differ in terms of how they are administered, access to the products and their costs.

Active Versus Passive Investing

Before getting into which of the products are suitable for you, there are some aspects that need to be considered so that you understand what the variations are among the products.

Active investing is when someone (a portfolio manager) picks the stocks that are in the fund and decides how much of each one to hold (the weighting). This portfolio manager would also monitor the portfolio and decide when a security should be sold off, added to or have its weighting decreased. Since there is ongoing research, meetings and analysis that must be done to build and monitor this portfolio, this fund manager would have research analysts and administrative personnel to help run the fund.

Passive investing has the same setup as active investing, but rather than someone deciding what securities to buy or how much of each one to buy, the portfolio manager would copy a benchmark. A benchmark is a collection of securities which the fund is compared against to see how well it is doing. Since everything in investing is about how much money you can make and how much risk it takes to make that money, every fund out there is trying to compare to all of the other funds of the same type to see who can make the most money. The basis for the comparisons is the benchmark, and then it becomes comparing between peers or funds managed the same way. Comparisons in general are done only for returns. The risk aspect of the equation is handled by looking at what type of securities the fund holds or how specialized the fund is.

How Do I Know By the Fund Name If it is Active or Passive?

The short answer is that you have to get to know how the fund manager operates the fund. Some clues to know more quickly if the fund is active or passive are given next. If they are intentionally trying to pick securities according to some beliefs that they have about the market, this is active management. If the fund description talks about “beating the benchmark” or “manager skill” then it is actively managed. Another clue is to look at the return history. If returns vary versus the index by different amounts each year, then the fund is actively managed. Lastly, the fees may be expensive and have sales loads.

If the name of the fund says “Index” or “Index fund” there is a good chance that the fund is passively managed. If the name of the fund says “ETF” this could be a passive fund, but you need to make sure of this because some ETFs are actually active funds, but they are managed in a certain way. Most of the passively managed ETFs are provided by BMO, iShares, Claymore, Vanguard and Horizons in Canada and Powershares, Vanguard and SPDR (or Standard and Poors) and others if the holdings are from the U.S. Most of the other companies would have actively managed funds only. If the fund description states that the fund is trying to “imitate” the performance of an index or benchmark, then this implies that it is copying the index and this is passively managed. From the return perspective, passively managed funds will be very close to the index that they claim to imitate, but slightly less due to fees each year. The amount that the returns are under the index will be close to identical each year unless there are currency conversions or variances in cost which may come from currency fluctuations or hedging that the fund may do. Passive funds typically do not have sales loads as they are geared toward people who invest for themselves.

There are some funds that try to mix active and passive management. These funds can be assumed to be actively managed, although their results will be closer to the benchmark than most of the other funds, so this is something to consider if the variation from the index is a factor.

Types of Costs

Whatever product you buy, there will be a cost associated with buying it, keeping it and selling it. This will be true whether you have an advisor versus doing it yourself, and whichever institution you go to. Even buying your own individual stocks will have trading fees which you must account for. How much you are paying for each product however as well as the advice will make a large difference in what return you will get after everything is done.

There are many types of costs to be aware of when you are deciding which products to invest in. This article will focus on the passive funds that make up a growing selection of products for retail investors.

The Management Expense Ratio (MER)

This is the largest cost for most funds and represents the cost of managing the fund. “Managing the fund” means running the investment company, advertising, overhead and the cost for the advisor or sales person when it applies. Administrative costs like GST within the fund and accounting for trades and record keeping are also part of this cost. The MER is given as a percentage, which is the percentage of the assets that the fund manages or invests over a year of time. If you have $100,000 invested in a fund, and the MER is 0.5% per year, you are paying $500 per year to keep this fund. The cost is subtracted from the return and what you see in your investment statement is your return net of fees, or after fees. The Management Expense Ratio is the management fee plus the administrative costs. The administrative costs are usually between 0.05% and 0.1% of the assets of the fund. If the information you obtain states a “Management Fee” instead of a “Management Expense Ratio” you would have to add on the administrative costs to get the true fee. Seek out the prospectus and look up fund operating costs to find exactly how much the number is.

For American funds, this would be called the “Expense Ratio” which is the same thing as the Canadian MER, but advisory fees are not included in the ER. They would be included in Canada for the MER if the product is actively managed. If the product is passively managed in Canada or the U.S., the same names apply, but no advice would be part of the cost since these products are used by people who invest for themselves and would pay for advice separately if they retain it.

What Is Tracking Error?

In many cases, when you are buying a passive investment, you want to imitate an underlying benchmark or index. Another way of saying this is that you want to achieve the average rate of return in a given market all the time. Since every fund has costs to operate it, you will not get the benchmark 100% of the time because this means that you would be investing for free. The tracking error is the difference between the measured return that the benchmark provides and the actual return that the passive fund or imitating portfolio provides. As an example, if the S&P/TSX index had a return of 5% for a 1 year time period and 10% for a 2 year time period, and your fund had a return of 4.5% for 1 year and 9.5% for 2 years, then the tracking error would be 0.5% each year. Tracking error tends to be pretty consistent over all time periods but not perfectly consistent because the costs of running a fund will vary, and sometimes the act of trying to follow an index can get tricky if that index is very volatile or illiquid. The tracking error is not a fee per se but it is a way of measuring the costs of owning the real fund versus the index that it is being compared to. Tracking Error is also useful in determining how consistently the fund is being managed from a cost perspective.

Early Redemption Fee

Some companies charge an early redemption fee if you sell their fund within a short period of time. How short the period is will depend on the institution. In some cases, it is 30 days, but it can be 90 days, 6 months, 1 year or some other time period. This fee is designed to discourage quick redemptions or short term trading of the product.

Sales Loads

Sales loads for passive funds would only apply to a fund that is sold through a sales person. You may be able to get the same fund without the sales person in most cases. Passive investing generally does not have sales loads – but the exception would be if an advisor recommends these funds and charges you some type of fee for the selection. This would be another question to ask if you are being advised to buy a passive fund and are not seeing any direct cost to buying the product.

Currency Hedging Costs

This type of fee will occur in funds that trade in non-Canadian currencies and hedge them back so that the price you receive would be in Canadian dollars. The cost of transacting the hedge itself is the fee being described here, and it can range from 0.5% to 1% per year. If the fee is not disclosed, assuming a 0.5% fee is the cheapest that it will likely be. If you are investing in emerging market currencies or non-developed market currencies, the hedges are much more expensive to put in place and can go higher than 1% per year. This is a cost embedded in the return of the fund, but should be examined to flesh out exactly what you are paying to have the return hedged.

The alternative would be to keep the securities in their home currencies and whatever changes happen to the foreign exchange rates would be reflected in the price of the product. The fact that currency exchange rates can change is a risk of your investment, but it is not considered a fee like the other fees discussed in this article. This fee does not apply if the fund price is in your home currency. You may have a U.S. dollar account, buy a fund that trades in U.S. dollars and then redeem this fund for U.S. dollars. Until you convert the money on your own to Canadian dollars, there is no currency charge. You would have a conversion charge when you change the final dollar amount to Canadian dollars.

Other Passive Costs

Passive investing has some unique fees such as account administrative fees, trading fees, foreign exchange conversion fees, spreads on trading, opportunity costs and separate advice fees which are not seen in the active investing world because the account will capture all of these fees.

Account Administrative Fees

The account administrative fees are charged by an institution for opening your account, transferring securities in or out of your account, or an annual administrative fee to keep your account open. These fees may depend on how much money you have with the institution, and can be reduced or waived as your account balance increases. These fees tend to be a flat amount as opposed to a percentage, which means they are comparatively small versus the assets that the account may have.

Trading Fees

Trading fees are fees charged for trading stocks or exchange traded funds. These fees will typically be a flat fee per trade and will depend on how often you trade and what type of investments you trade. Generally, the more frequently you trade and the more exotic the product that you trade, the more the expense. The further you are from home in terms of what you trade, the more expensive the trades are is a rule that applies most of the time. The longer you hold onto an investment, the less trading you will do, and the cheaper the trading fees become over time since this cost would be spread out over the life of the investment.

Foreign Exchange Fees

Foreign exchange conversion fees will occur each time you exchange currency. This could be for withdrawing, exchanging securities, rebalancing among the holdings you have, or getting into securities or funds that are denominated in other currencies. Most of the time, the currency exchange rate has to do with the U.S. dollar, but it can be any currency if you have foreign accounts and do the investing passively.

Bid Ask Spreads and Opportunity Costs

Spreads on trading refers to the bid and ask price for a given security. When you buy something, you always pay the “ask” price or the higher price that the seller wants to receive, and when you sell something you would receive the “bid” price or the lower price that the buyer wants to receive. The difference between them is called the spread. To know how much this would be, examine a price quote for the fund you want to buy when the market is open and you will see the bid-ask spread when you look at any quotation for the fund. The difference between the bid price and the ask price would be the amount you are paying in dollars. This difference divided by the price of the purchase price of the fund would be the costs in terms of a percentage. As an example, if a fund has a bid price of $8.00 and an ask price of $8.10, you would be paying 10 cents per unit or share as a spread. If you bought the fund at $8.10, the cost would be $0.10/$8.10 or 1.2%. This percentage is a “one-time” fee for every buy and sell pair of trades. The longer you hold your investment and assuming the price rises, the cheaper this spread will get in terms of percentages since the value of the investment tends to rise higher over time. The reverse would be true if the value goes down for a given investment. The spread can vary over time and depending on how much volume is trading at a certain time of day.

If you decide to fix the price for buying or selling a security instead of going in at the prevailing price in the moment or “the market”, you run the risk of not getting the security or having to pay much more for it at a later date. This is called the opportunity cost and it will vary a lot with each trade but it does exist and would be considered if you are trying to time your trades and if you are doing it frequently.

Advisory Fees

Separate advice fees refer to a scenario where you would pay separately for advice and the products you are buying. This would be relevant if you hire a fee for service financial planner, advice only financial planner, money coach, or consultant who charges a flat fee for advice separately from whatever products you invest in. If you do it yourself, there are costs for research, courses or software that you would purchase to help you do the passive investing. Once again, if you have a traditional advisor, you are not seeing these costs itemized anywhere because they are part of the MER of the funds you hold in their account, but these costs would be standing on their own if you invest for yourself and buying your own securities.

Fees of Holding One Fund Inside of Another One

If a fund that you want to invest in has other funds in it as part of its holdings list, then you will pay the MER fee for the fund you are buying as well as the fund(s) that the fund holds. The best way to check if this is happening is to look at the holdings list. If a fund holds another fund, it tends to be a large holding so a fact sheet with a top 10 holdings summary should provide good information. If you want to be really thorough about this, you would have to get an entire holdings list with each and every holding in it so you can see if there are minor holdings that may be funds. This is typically not necessary as the further down the holdings list a security is, the smaller its weighting is and the less impact the fees will have on your total cost.

The actual numbers for each of these items will differ depending on specifically what the fund is and how it is managed. If the fee is necessary to operate the fund, like currency hedging, then this would be included. Whether a fund holds stocks or another fund can also impact withholding taxes if the fund is investing outside of Canada – particularly for U.S. products. This topic can get complex, so it will not be discussed here. Some funds will contain other funds to get access to illiquid markets, or to trade in parts of the world that have hundreds of securities. Buying a fund in these cases would actually save on time and trading costs, so it can be justified depending on the market being invested in.

Intangible Costs

The key takeway is that you need to do a cradle to grave analysis of what you have and see the costs from beginning to end to get an idea of what is really happening. Ideally, the costs should factor in time spent, effort spent on research, tools used for investing and costs of discipline and assurance which would be available when dealing with an advisor that may not be there when you are doing it yourself. When comparisons are done to the market index or benchmark, this is really an ideal (free) comparison which is not realistic. You cannot buy a free version of the index – the ETFs come closest to this and are represented as the passive way to invest.

Where to Find These Costs?

The most comprehensive place that will contain the most detail regarding fund costs is the prospectus. This can be found be searching for the product name and the word “prospectus”. If you do not know the exact product name, you can search the fund management company only and then search for the product name on their web site. The fund companies will have these documents with the regulator as well as their own web sites and they will be typically in PDF format which can be read and downloaded from your computer. A simplified prospectus would also have the same data that you would be looking for regarding fees.

Do you want to:
Learn how the world of money really works without the need of a time consuming or expensive course of study
Discuss what you want to achieve according to your horizon
Restructuring your finances to achieve your goals
Advice that is not affiliated with any institution or any product – an independent opinion

How To Succeed At Online Product Creation The Easy Way

Product creation could be a frightening subject for a lot of Internet marketers to face. Some folks who get in the game with the intention of making a full time income are completely ignorant as to how an online business operates. One of the most profitable ways to create online cash is by creating a product that others are happy to pay for.

Product creation is legitimate method of generating money through internet marketing but many entrepreneurs get it wrong. They start by imitating their Internet marketing gurus by creating information products on Internet marketing in hopes of getting rich the way their heroes did. The problem is that they usually don’t know what they are doing and enter a highly competitive niche with very little marketing experience or connections.

Here are a few tips for effective product creation that may help you get on the right track:
Start by finding a profitable niche with low to moderate competition. If you conduct some rudimentary market research and keyword research, you’ll find many opportunities in areas that will surprise you. Amazon and eBay are two great places to brainstorm for product ideas.

Developing Your Product does not have to be a difficult project. You can find experts in the right field for your niche and pay them to write the material while an artist designs the packaging and website or blog. You can outsource the entire product creation part of the project after you conduct the research and testing to ensure profitability.

Sales and marketing strategies should be created while developing the product and learning about the market. Some experienced marketers use pay per click to drive traffic to their offer page; some folks outsource the entire marketing campaign to affiliates through ClickBank or other affiliate programs.

Product creation does not need to be hard, particularly when the merchandise is electronic. E-books, videos, audio and multi-media products sell very well. They are distributed immediately to customers electronically. Once you have a good feel for a niche market, try to service your customers with associated products and upgrades. If you want to earn money online through product creation, you must understand supply and demand. The majority of new online marketers fail miserably because they go after highly competitive markets or forget to research their chosen niche properly. You have to create your products according to the needs, wants and desires of the prospective customers.