Basic types of investment

I'm following the investment basics from Motley Fool (www.fool.com) for now and will post whatever I've read. I usually get only about an hour of free time a day so I can only read a little. I'm sure some of my next few blogs has info that is pretty basic and a lot of people already know, but hey it doesn't hurt to review the basics.

So to start with, there are savings acct, CD, etc considered to be "short term investment" since their return is low but is fairly safe. I'm not going to go into those. I mean even my mom knows what a CD is (no offense mom). The stuff that is more interesting is the long term investments which are:

• Bonds
• Stocks
• Mutual Funds
• ETF (Exchange-traded funds)

ETF isn't listed as one of the long term investment vehicles in the article, but my friend mentioned it to me. I also remember hearing about it from Suze Orman (www.suzeorman.com). You know that lady who is always giving financial advice on TV shows. She mentioned a while back that it's way cooler than Mutual funds. I figure I'll put it down here so I don't forget.

The article also mentioned about different types of retirement plans:

• IRA
• Roth IRA
• 401k/403b
• Keogh
• Simplified Employee Pension (SEP) Plan

I've always heard about IRA, 401k and the less popular Pension plan. I had no idea there is Keogh for self employed people. I guess if I ever want to start my own company, it'll be good to know about this option since there will be no 401k. The article gave some basics on them, but let's be honest, they're so vague I'll forget about them before I hit publish, so I won't even bother to review them. Besides the tax benefit for each one is so different, I should spend more time to research about them.

Like I said, pretty basic, but I'll just stop here for now.