Hello and welcome back to Moneygirls Quick and Dirty Tips for Richer Life.

I'm your host Laura Adams. This episode is about whether the time is right to get back

in the market for long-term investing. We all agree that 2008 was a rotten year to be invested in stocks

for the long term. Many investors threw up their hands, sold out, and put their money in

safer havens until the storm passed.

Well, has the storm passed?

Should we get ready for sunnier days when we can profit from the market's turn around?

I'm not going to go out on a limb and say that the markets hit bottom yet. It's too early for that.

But right now the Dow Jones industrial average is up over 1400 points from the significant low we saw in early March. I do believe there are

optimistic signs that a turnaround point may be near. So if you've had all your money on the sidelines,

this could be the perfect time to get back into stocks

of strong companies that have good prospects for the future.

Keep in mind that no one really knows where the market will go from here. The catch-22 is that investing

for the long term too early means potential losses if the markets decline further.

But investing too late may mean serious mis-profit opportunities.

Before you do anything, you should know that recovering which you may have lost very quickly is unlikely.

The market would have to nearly double just to get back to where we were in October of 2007,

but there will be a recovery, and if you miss the upswing, it could take many additional years to rebuild your wealth.

The reality is that the only way to profit from the market is to have money in the market at the right time.

A wise man once said that if the timing's right and the gods are with you, something special happens.

Okay, that was actually a Rick Springfield quote, but I think he was on to something.

The best way to get a sense for when the time is right is to keep your eye on the ball.

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