Everything costs money whether you like it or not. As they say, “there’s no free lunch”. Even that ‘free’ toothbrush you got at the dentist cost someone money. When it comes to investing, even though you are making money, it is not free. You pay commissions when you buy stocks and you have to put in the time to research and purchase it. It costs your time and some money.

One type of investment is a mutual fund. With a mutual fund everyone who invests in it put their money together which the fund manager uses to buy the stocks they choose. With load funds you have to pay a commission, but with no-load funds, you pay no commission. This is the closest you’ll get to free investment money because you pay no commission and you don’t have to research the stock choices.

Without the fees you would normally have to pay, you are able save money and put more into your investments. The more money you invest, the more money you will make because you have more money collecting interest or capital gains.

By investing you are making your money work for you. The more you invest, the more money you’ll make. Investing in no-load funds allows you to do this seamlessly.

When you invest in stocks and bonds, you should never just blindly choose a stock. Don’t just choose a stock and buy it because you shopped there last week. This causes your risk to go way up. Instead, you have to put at least a few hours into research for each stock before you buy it. You may even put some research time into a stock and not end up buying it.

There is yet another time costing activity to investing directly in stocks. You need to know how to invest and how to research stocks. This is going to take quite a bit of time and learning. Once you get going, this time will reduce, but you’ll always be honing your skill.

Mutual funds save a lot of time. You don’t have to research, aside from choosing the initial fund, and you don’t have to know how to research. With a mutual fund, the fund manager, who is likely an expert, does all this for you. You save hours and hours of your time. You make the initial choice of a mutual fund and let the manager do the rest.

If you want to spend a lot of money on fees and commission for loaded funds, you can, but it’s likely they won’t earn that much more money and they might even earn you less after the fees. If you are interested in having a well diversified portfolio that is very easy and cheap, get a mutual fund.