If you are a beginner investor ...

Lets begin with why you need more money.

• You want to get out of debt
• You want no more money worries
• You want nice things
• You want to help your family and others
• You don't want to work every day for the rest of your life

We all should agree with these reasons for having more money.

What is keeping you from having all the money that you need?

• The cost of living is too high
• You have too many bills to pay
• Your job doesn't pay enough
• Theres nothing left over to save and invest

If you agreed with these reasons why you dont have enough money, you have to change your thinking right now. Really.

Do you want to get rich? Then follow the following plan. But first there are three important things that you need to do right now:

• protect your current investments, if any open a mutual fund account, and begin contributing to it
• get your spending under control

Protecting your current investments If you have a 401(k), 403(b), or 457 plan at work, instruct your benefits department to move everything into a mid-cap index fund (if offered), otherwise split everything evenly between an S&P 500 fund and whatever type of mid-cap fund is offered.

If you currently own any mutual funds, they have probably lost money this past year. If they are not in an IRA, sell them now and take a tax deduction (let the IRS cover part of your loss) and take all the money and put it into a mid-cap index fund. If you have a brokerage account, either a full-service or online account, sell all of your losers and put the money into your winners. Then tell your broker that you want to place a stop loss at 7% under the current price.

Open a mutual fund account and begin contributing.

Get your spending under control right now If you don't get serious about this, you are not just throwing away the extra money that you needlessly spend, but the huge amount that this money will grow to if properly invested. This is the only way that you will get out of debt and get rid of your money worries, forever.

Since getting your spending under control is so important, you had better jump right into talking about smart spending. This is where your investing money will come from. The extra money saved will provide you with every dollar that you need to become rich.

Recommendation: Read the Book 'Rich Dad Poor Dad' to know more about cash flow.

The Secrets of Investing - How to Invest Properly and Get Rich Quick!

If you can't rely on your own research, or if you don’t have time to do the research, you might as well make your investment decisions based on tips from that smart guy at work. No, no, I'm just kidding. Tips are for restaurants.

Important Rules to Follow When Buying a Stock

These suggestions are presented with the assumption that you intend to remain a casual investor. I strongly recommend mastering the art of technical analysis (reading charts, analyzing price and volume moves) if you intend to become more serious about the timing of your purchases.

With this said, you should still be able to buy good stocks if you follow these rules:

1.Don't ever buy a stock without first examining its financial health. You are going to learn how to do this.

2. Don't ever buy a stock without first learning about its business and who its competition is. You want to focus on the leaders in an industry.

3. Buy when market indexes are in an up-trend. Don't try to bottom-guess, wait until the stock or the market has clearly turned around, with several days of price increases on larger than usual volume.

4. Buy the top companies of industries or market sectors with many stocks hitting new highs.

5. Buy companies with new products or services that are expanding (profitably), especially young companies.

6. Determine if large or small-cap stocks are favored in the current market.

7. Pick companies with high management ownership. With their personal stake, there will be a tendency to make moves that will stimulate investor's interest.

8. Quarterly earnings should be up at least 25% in each of the past three quarters.

9. Earnings should be up at least 25% in each of the last three years, or at least 40% for the past two years. If it is a young company, sales should be up over 50% for each of the past four quarters.

10. If sales are not increasing by at least 10% in each of the past three quarters over the same quarters in the prior year, pass on it.

11. Always average up with your winners – let your winners run. Never average down – get out of the stock if it goes against you. Buying more because it’s cheaper and a “bargain” is one of the biggest temptations, and very hard to resist. But dollar-cost-averaging individual stocks that are falling in price, is a really bad strategy.