Investing Ideas for Women Busy with Business
If you’re a woman starting up or operating your own business, odds are that personal investment isn’t on the top of your mind. That doesn’t mean you don’t take it seriously, but there’s so much to do in order to position a business for success that investing can — justifiably — take a back seat.
As understandable as this is, women business owners should try to do what they can to develop investment portfolios even as they work toward greater success for their companies. Investment is effectively a means of compounding what you’re able to make with your business endeavors — building on those hard-earned dollars over time. Additionally, as per our take on women’s retirement savings, women in business need to plan on longer retirements! This is all the more reason to take investment seriously even when things are busy with business.
With that said though, it’s not exactly feasible to be managing a busy trading account and running a successful business all at once. For this reason, we have some suggestions for less time-consuming investments that still offer significant potential for monetary growth.
Index Funds
An index fund can be defined as a sampling of assets that are meant to represent a segment of a larger financial market. As an example, arguably the best-known index in the world (or at least the U.S.) is the S&P 500, which represents 500 of the biggest companies in America from a stock perspective. So in effect, trading one of these funds is a form of stock market investment. But the benefits of index funds can be attractive to people who may typically be too busy or preoccupied to pay close attention to investments. These benefits include passive management (you merely have to buy into an index that is determined for you), low-expense t trading, and inherent diversification. It’s a total package of stock market investment wrapped into a neat, manageable bundle.
CFDs
CFD stands for “contract for difference,” and it’s a fairly common type of investment among those seeking simpler or less time-consuming options — even if it’s most often related to the frenzied forex market. Forex CFD trades aren’t the only options (you can actually even trade stock shares though CFDs), but they do illustrate the concept well. In ordinary forex trading, investing in the Euro against the U.S. dollar would mean buying EUR/USD as a sort of asset unto itself. But a CFD trade would mean setting up an agreement with the broker stipulating that you foresee the EUR/USD value rising in a given period of time. If correct, you earn a return equal to the difference in value over time (multiplied by the CFD units you purchased). It does require some attention, but this CFD format allows for a more hands-off approach, with trades determined over time and thus requiring less active management.
Specialized Savings Accounts
If you’d rather avoid traditional investment altogether and opt for an option that involves virtually no hands-on attention, you can turn to savings accounts as well. But since an ordinary savings account tends to involve virtually negligible maturation, you may want to look into specialized alternatives instead. High-yield accounts, or certificates of deposit, work similarly to ordinary accounts, but provide you with more robust returns in exchange for certain conditions (such as leaving your funds in the account for a predetermined period of time). For a full-fledged personal investment effort, this is not considered a particularly aggressive or impactful option. But if you merely want to put some of your business earnings into a situation where they’ll gradually mature — while taking no risk and making no extra effort — it’s still something to consider.
Long-Term Plays
“Long-term play” is a vague suggestion, but the idea here is to seek out investments you can put some money into and simply leave alone — perhaps even for years at a time. It might be a precious commodity: gold investment for instance, which has long been valued as a long-term play (and which has performed particularly strongly in 2020). It might be real estate: a property you can purchase that projects to gain value over time. Ideas like these are never guarantees, but they can make for sound strategic options for those with limited time and long-term investment on their minds.
Ultimately the important thing is to make the investments that best suit your needs and strategies. But women in business work hard and face a lot of challenges, which can leave little time for active investment. Given those conditions, the suggestions here can be helpful and productive.
