776 words Investing for Income -- An Easy Step by Step Plan by YOURNAME Before telling you how to invest for income, let's review the steps that most ordinary investors take, to invest for capital gains. 1. Go online and read websites. Read Money Magazine, Barrons and Motley Fool books. Subscribe to investing newsletters. Watching many investing cable TV shows. There must be a way to pick stocks that are going to outperform the market. You're way smart. If you just do your research, you know that you can discover the Secrets technique, apply it and get rich. You don't think about how many pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, brokerage firms and other financial institution also want this secret to picking stocks that are guaranteed to beat the market. You don't think about how these funds -- with hundreds of billions of dollars under their control -- can afford to hire large teams of geniuses with PhDs in Math and Finance. Not to mention banks of personal computers that can outperform the Pentagon, but they're all combing through the financial market prices changes, using proprietary software to isolate the secret factor that will allow the fund to beat the market, guaranteed. You don't think about how everything you read, online or offline, is also available to every other investor includig those teams of PhDs, so that if anything works, it will be copied and done to death, and therefore reflected in the current market price, before you can log on to your online brokerage site to give a Buy order. One piece of advice you keep reading over and over is, "Don't pay attention to stock tips." Then that magazine or newsletter or cable TV show will give stock tips. 2 Eventually you figure out they're really telling you, "Pay attention only to our stock tips." And you figure out that between your job and your family you won't have time to find the stocks guaranteed to beat the market, so you decide to leave the job to a professional. You'll send your money to a mutual fund. 3. You research mutual funds, and eventually send off the money you still have left to a large cap fund in one of the well-respected, no-load mutual fund families. Nobody tells you how you'll be paying a big chunk of your profits in management fees, before your share price is even reported to you. And when you get a year-end statement showing how much you have to report on your tax return as short term and long term capital gains, you realize that this will eat up the entire tax refund you were expecting, you shrug your shoulders. You don't have time to learn to be an accountant, so you can't pick stocks yourself. 4. You wait twenty years. The books all told you that in twenty years you should average a 10% per year profit. Only the market for growth stocks hasn't bottomed out yet from when retiring baby boomers sold them off. The U.S. dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency. Electricity is still being rationed. The United Nations wants to impose more income taxes on you (and every other American citizen) to pay for the reconstruction of Iran. Hydrogen-powered cars are still too expensive for the average family. Therefore, your mutual fund price is still below its 21st century high. 5. You get a good stock tip about a new nanotechnology company that promises it's discovered an inexpensive way to reduce radiation. It's just what Denver, Baghdad and Tel Aviv need . . . Here's the step by step plan for income investors -- 1. Read one book. 2. Take out investments in a broad index of popular consumer brand name stocks, utility stocks, Canadian trusts, master limited partnerships and real estate investment trusts (REITs). Put some money into special bonds that keep up with inflation, guaranteed by the U.S. government. 3. Pay income taxes on the income you receive. Reinvest the remainder. 4. Wait 20 years. Despite wars, unemployment, terrorism and energy crises, people around the world continue to eat fast food and snacks, rent apartments, talk to each other on cell phones, drive their gas-burning cars (or ride gas-burning buses), heat their homes with natural gas and drink water. Therefore, your income investments continued to pay dividends. Some companies slowed down or even stopped their dividend growth. Some electric utilities were bought out by competitors. A master limited partnership was fined by a regulator but is still in business. A shopping center REIT was put out of business by the recession and online shopping, but the others you own are still thriving. When you retire, you move to a deluxe villa on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. You enjoy the tropical climate and beautiful beach until you die. SUMMARY With today's financial markets as uncertain and unstable as they are, traditional buy and hold, and pick winning stocks, strategies don't promise much return. You must rely on luck, and that's not reliable over the long term. Stocks have gone nowhere since 1999. Yet people who invest for income have received regular quarterly dividends. KEYWORDS investing for income, income investing, income investor, income investments, dividends, income investment, dividend, stock investing, dividend investing, stock dividends, invest for income RESOURCE BOX You don't have to wait decades for the market to go up before making money. By investing for income, you assure yourself of quarterly dividend checks whether the stock's price goes up or down. Learn the secrets to getting a high yield with maximum safety. Don't sit on your hands while your portfolio goes nowhere. 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