Want to start investing, mind boggling. Can anyone advise..?

[sakura]

Okay, I've decided to get my life in order and have decided investing might be a good way of going about it. I have no idea where to start! Nobody in my family has ever invested so I can't ask them, I'm on my own, basically.

Where do I start? Any good books or websites on the subject? I don't even know what 'mutual funds' are.

I quite fancy the idea of eventually doing it myself rather than paying a middle-man to do it for me (obviously I'm looking at the distant future as I am still clueless)

Any suggestions would be most welcome

I can recommend checking out www.childmillionaire.com - a start from the basics do it yourself how to guide geared towards parents investing for their children but the same principles apply if you are investing for retirement and www.fool.co.uk or if you are in the US, www.fool.com, which is a great source of information on value investing.

If you don't know what mutual funds are then you are better off not knowing as essentially they are investment pools that on average underperform market benchmarks and charge very high fees regardless of whether they make money or not. Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are a much better bet. They are also investment funds but they have very low fees, track benchmarks [there are hundreds] in pretty much any market and are bought and sold cheaply like stocks.

Good luck!

Oh thank you LOngterm!