Online investment company ShareBuilder (owned by ING Direct) is offering up 10 free investment credits to new and existing customers who set up an Automatic Investment Plan before January 31st. This is a great way to start investing for the New Year! Normally automatic investments are $4 per trade.
The Automatic Investment Plan allows you to set up recurring weekly, or monthly (or one-time) investments which occur on Tuesdays every week. Why is this great? Fractional shares! You can pick an amount you want to invest and ShareBuilder will buy that amount of shares, even as a fraction. It’s through this plan that I’m able to own a piece of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway. The shares are quite expensive but I’m able to still buy a piece of it.
ShareBuilder also offers real-time trades (not part of this offer) and allows for dividend re-investing.
One of the things I particularly like about ShareBuilder is that they are part of ING Direct where I have an online savings and checking account. When I want to fund my ShareBuilder account I can quickly transfer money over. I can also see all of my account totals on one page.
Here’s the legal mumbo jumbo from the ShareBuilder site:
The 10 free Automatic Investment Plan credits are available 2-4 weeks after you create a Plan during the month of January 2010 with at least one security. With an Automatic Investment Plan you can invest any dollar amount on Tuesdays exclusively online, schedule investments on a weekly or monthly basis. Select from our list of over 7,000 stocks and ETFs. Investment and funding instructions can be edited up to 5:00 pm ET on the Monday before your purchase. Real-time trade commissions apply to all sales. All sales of stock are made real-time and are subject to Real-time Trade commissions.
If you have been looking to start investing then this might be a nice place to start looking.
Bonus: If you sign up as a new customer and use the code 50DOLLARS you will get a $50 bonus in your account!! (You need to open the account with $50) Expires 3/31/10
As always, do your research before investing and make sure you understand the account and make sure it is right for you before you sign up!
