What is the minimum amount I can invest if I want to get into a mutual fund?
The person below who recommended UMBIX, from Excelsior makes a good recommendation. It is a 5 star morningstar.com rated fund, very good. So you can start there. But since you are putting $200 to $500 a month after that, I recommend using a brokerage firm such as E*Trade (http://www.etrade.com). The advantage of this is that you are not required to buy mutual funds only from one company (such as Excelsior). You can choose from many funds. With E*Trade, there are over 7000 funds: https://us.etrade.com/e/t/investingandtr… What you can do with this is choose 4 or 5 star morningstar rated fund that has no load and no transaction fee (cheap to enter!). Also, there are many different mutual funds, and some mutual funds have a minimum of $1000, some with a minimum of $100. You can easily set up automatic investing too
Because you have so little to be investing (and i commend you on getting starting) you want to avoid investing costs wherever and whenever possible. To do this, I would do some research, there are some good funds that allow minimum initial investments as low as 250.00. Try fool.com and smartmoney.com for additional sources and screening tools. If you buy the fund through the company, you wont have to pay a fee each time you buy (whereas with scottrade for example, you would). You would do best with a multi cap or large cap fund. Not small, micro cap, or natural resources. You want to capture the overall market for right now and diversify with more specific sectors later. Another option are ETFs, but because you seem to be doing monthly investments, these will not be cost effective for you.
