Fidelity Investments www.fidelity.com Review

I'm rich! I'm rich!

Oh dear. I'm not at all rich. But we did sell our overpriced home in California last year, and we wondered what to do with the tidy profit. Before we got carried away, we had to figure out logistics: i.e., where to stash the dough.

One of my brothers, a former Wall Street portfolio manager, recommended Fidelity as an alternative to a regular bank. What's the difference?

Well, with a regular bank, the presumption is that you're going to spend your money. You open a checking account, get a credit card or even a mortgage, and start pissing it away, whether you have a plan for paying it back or not. So you get treated like Deadbeat #1 straight from the get-go.

With a brokerage, you're investing, and like most investors, you'll lose some but steadily gain a lot. Most people invest conservatively over a lifetime in a pension or college fund, and the brokerages make money off fees and commissions, so it's win-win all around.

You get treated like you're personally making their Lexus payments, and it feels good.

To start, I called a special phone number reserved for royalty (or at least people who, by sheer accident of birth, aren't royalty but obviously should be) and made instant Best Friends with a real, live broker, not a call center in India. He walked me through opening my first brokerage account, advising me which Money Market should serve as my base account, where my money would rest from the rigors of earning more money as I bought and sold various securities such as T-bills, stocks or bonds.

Fidelity is a discount brokerage, which means you mostly won't be relying on Mr. Best Friend Broker for your transactions, or they will charge you extra. The idea is to do as much online by your little self as you can, and rely on human help when something goes awry, such as when the much-awaited house sale went through, but the electronic transfer didn't. Yipes! Where'd all that money go?

We got it straightened out, and have enjoyed learning about how to nurture our nest egg in the hopes it can someday buy a whole new nest. I'm also thinking of moving my IRA over, and I have my son's college account with them now too.

Besides keeping track of your accounts and transactions, just like online banking, the Fidelity site gives you one-stop shopping for all your investing. Plus, it's written in plain English. You don't need an MBA to know a mutual fund from a mutual friend; but you must be willing to do your homework.

What's an ETF? How do I trade futures? What's the difference between a bond rate and a bond rating? I boned up on financial info with their site, plus articles on Yahoo! Finance, Motley Fool and a stock-market simulator called Investopedia before a single penny went their way.

I admit it--I looked mostly at the pictures. Erm, charts. Yes, I love charts. Is it up? Down? Ziggedy-zaggy? Bring it on!

I'm no expert. I'm not even an advanced beginner. As we learn more, maybe we'll ratchet up our level of risk. Maybe not. But I do know that if an investment of ours heads south, it won't be for lack of information, except maybe the ability to foretell the future.

There are many discount brokerages out there: Vanguard, E-trade, Ameritrade and Charles Schwab are Fidelity's main rivals. I cannot compare them, as this is the only experience I've had with a brokerage of any sort, but I'd recommend Fidelity to anyone, whether you're making your first stock purchase or finding a safe place to roll over your 401k.

You gotta start someplace, right?