Why Do I Need to Invest? If you have found your way here, chances are you have either got some additional money sitting in savings or you are planning to. What are you saving for? Retirement? College for the kids? A new car? A new speaker system complete with woofers and tweeters? A retirement villa in the sun-baked hills of Tuscany?

Say you take $2000 of your savings and put it into the stock market. If your money returned 11% a year (the S&P 500's historical average), two grand would be worth $53,416.19 after 30 years. You could buy that Tuscan retirement villa (or at least come up with the down payment) with that kind of money.

Maybe you do not have $2000 spare cash sitting in your bank account, but perhaps you can afford to invest your lunch money. Brown-bag your lunch and sock away just $4 a day, 250 days a year. It is not a lot, but if you are in your early 20s, you have got the investor's best ally on your side, time. If you invest $1,000 once a year in an investment that averages an 11% annual return, the annual stock market return since 1926, it will grow to more than $1 million after 46 years, which is right around the time you will be ready to retire.

Of course, as you get older and more financially stable, you should be able to put away more to invest. Upping the ante to just $166 a month (lunch money plus about what you pay for basic cable TV and a movie channel), would put you at the million-dollar mark in just 39 years.

Simply put, if you want to invest in order to create wealth. It is relatively painless, and the rewards are plentiful. By investing in the stock market, you will have a lot more money for things like retirement, education, recreation, or you could pass on your riches to the next generation. Whether you are starting from scratch or have a few thousand dollars saved, the Investing content in this section will help get you going on the road to financial well-being.