The value for a share of the mutual fund is determined daily. It is equal to all the market value of all the money the mutual fund has invested divided by the number of shares the fund has issued. So, let's say that the total market value of all the stocks the fund holds at the end of the day is $1 billion, and the fund has 100,000,000 shares outstanding: $1,000,000,000/100,000,000 shares = $10/share.
If you bought your mutual fund through a broker, simply call the broker and ask them to sell the fund (or sell a certain amount from the fund). If you bought the fund through the fund company itself, you call the mutual fund company and ask the same.
The goal of Mutual Fund investments is typically to GROW money, not to "generate an income stream" (at least not until "later on")...
Let's say you are 25 now, and have a job that pays you $35,000 a year, and you commit to investing 10 or 15% of everything you earn into a low-expense Aggressive Growth Mutual Fund....if you keep that up over the next 30 years (even if you NEVER get a raise!), you will have actually invested between $35,000 & $78,750 into the fund, but when you quit working at age 50, it will have grown in value to somewhere between $569,696 and $927,110...
(Most likely you will have the mean of those two values, or $748,403...)
THEN you start taking it out to live on...and you can reasonably expect to be able to draw out 6% of the money ($44,904 a year, or $863 a week) FOREVER without it ever running out, because it will continue to grow faster (on average) than the rate you are pulling it out....
Will that make you "rich"? Well not really, but presumably you wouldn't expect to work for 30 years without EVER getting a raise!
Your question gave me a headache. Get yourself a Roth IRA. The contribution meaning the funds that you put into the account could be withdrawn anytime but the gains require taxes due, if withdrawan before 59 1/2. Make life easy not hard
Best of luck
I know what they are, but how do I "make" money off of them? Like for instance, if a mutual fund invested heavily in stocks, and those stocks gave dividends, would those dividends go straight to my brokerage account?
How is the value of the mutual fund determined? Can I sell mutual funds like I sell stocks? If not, then how do I get out of the mutual fund with the money I earned?
