Investing 102

[GregWeld]

Originally Posted by Tyler E

After a few years of watching builds, a few weeks of reading this thread, Ive gotta say I'm a little nervous for my first post to be in investing. An area I, up until reading this thread, knew nothing about.

Anyway, is there an online calculator, or formula that would allow me to figure out:

If I invested $10,000 in say Kinder Morgan (KMP) 10 years ago, and reinvested the dividends, where would my money be sitting today, and if this steady eddie were to continue on its path, where would my money be in 10 years, 20 years? Roughly speaking.

Also, I want to thank everyone who has contributed. This thread is an eye opener. Your honesty and openess is very much appreciated.

Glad to hear you're getting something out of all this typing!!


I can't find a 10 year TOTAL RETURN figure -- but it was easy to do a 5 year -
so your 10 grand FIVE years ago -- would now be 16 grand. I'm thinking that the 10 grand 10 years ago would be 25,000+ easy.

That's where the TIME comes into play in investing... 10 becomes 20 becomes 40 becomes 80 becomes 160... so if you put the 10 grand away that you got from graduation instead of blowing it and going to Italy for a month by the time you're 60 years old that 10,000 is $160,000 Now at 60 you'd appreciate Italy even more and you could go for a couple months!

Now imagine if you would - that you were clever enough to save $10,000 at 20 years old and then added 5,000 a year every year until you were 40....