I bagan using Sharebuilder in January 2009. I have a 401K account through work that has been doing terrible over the last year like everyone else's is doing. My husband talked me into getting into the market with Sharebuilder on a small sacle now that the market is as close to zero as you can get. We started small with $100 a month and are now at $200 per month. I received a bonus at work and put it into the account and we decided to not try and guess individual stocks that would go up, so we picked some ETF's (Exchange Traded Fund). We feel like we almost know what we are doing, as the market has started to move in the right direction for us, and if it does this for another month or two, I can see us getting back everything that we lost in our 401K's this year, and getting ahead by next year. The forced savings of automatic investing makes it feel like we never received the money to start, and it doesn't hurt as much. We have hardly had to change how we live to allow for the money going into our account.