How To Put Money In The Sp 500

How to invest in the S&P 500 with little money

— -- Q: What's the least amount I can invest in the Standard & Poor's 500 index?

A: Uncomparable of the biggest changes for individual investors is just how slender they can be. You don't need much money, $200 operating theatre to a lesser extent, to invest to get started.

Just a fewer years ago, most common funds and brokerages required investors to bring out a decent sum of money to the table just to amaze started. Minimum deposits of $500 if not $1,000 were pretty standard with eve leadership discount brokerages not long since.

Investors with fewer money to part with face notwithstandin another hurdle: fees. Even if a brokerage emotional just $15 for a trade, smaller investors could get chewed up in a hurry. Even a apparently limited $15 a patronage committal crapper follow pretty usurious for an investor just looking to bargain $50 Beaver State so of stock at once.

Some of these hurdles to smaller investors, invoice minimums and commissions, continue to erode inaccurate. You'll just need to obtain a brokerage that offers accounts with no minimum balance that will set aside you to invest in the S&P 500 with no or low trading fees.

You have several possibilities. If you're dead set on investing, literally, in the Standard & Poor's 500 one come near might be to barefaced an write u with a deep discount brokerage house like TradeKing, ING Sharebuilder or Zecco and buy Vanguard's S&A;P 500 exchange-traded fund voo. Each of these rock-bottom-cost brokerages appropriate investors to open accounts with no minimum stick. You could then buy one share of the Vanguard S&adenylic acid;P 500 exchange-listed investment trust for the current market value, currently about $60, plus a roughly $5 commission. You can own the S&P 500 for to a lesser extent than $70.

Keep in mind, with this approach you'll want to yield the commissioning each time you adorn more money. The $5 a share commissions can add up over time. You will also need to pay the commission when you sell.

Another approach might be to sign on with a brokerage that has No account minimums and besides offers free trading in an S&P 500 ETF. TD Ameritrade, e.g., has No account lower limit. You fire open an accounting and then buy and deal out shares of the iShares S&P 500 ivv and pay no commission. The downside: the ETF has a higher per-share price of $130. Don't concern. You're still paying the same valuation for the S&P 500, IT's just that the per share price is higher. With this technique, you have a high entry Leontyne Price but won't have to worry just about the ongoing commissions.

Other brokerages crack possible solutions, but experience their own downsides. For instance, Scottrade offers an ETF that's like the S&ere;P 500, called the Focus Morningstar Large Cap Index ETF flg, with a lower per-share price of $25 a share. However, Scottrade has a minimum stick of $500. Likewise, Schwab offers an S&P 500-like ETF that trades for about $30 a share, but Schwab has an first deposit of $1,000.

The bottom line is that if you have less than $200 to invest, then yes, you can buy out into the S&P 500 or something very similar and still keep your costs really ground-hugging. If some readers have some other suggestions, feel give up to share them in the comments incision below.

Matt Krantz is a commercial enterprise markets reporter at USA TODAY and author of Investing Online for Dummies and Fundamental Analysis for Dummies. Atomic number 2 answers a different lector question all weekday in his Ask Lusterlessness column at money.usatoday.com. To submit a question, e-mail Matt at mkrantz@usatoday.com. Keep abreast Matt on Twitter at: twitter.com/mattkrantz