Whether starting your own business or just looking to add security to your life, investing is important.

About once a month, I get a phone call from a friend or a friend’s friend who is a financial manager and wants to help me ‘wisely’ invest my money. They will tout great statistics and flow charts and quotes from successful people that all indicate that I should invest my money in their mutual funds or trading programs.

I’m like every other person trying to live the American dream. I want freedom. One of those freedoms is financial freedom. Everyone with some common sense and/or who has read The Richest Man In Babylonknows that it’s important that you pay yourself before others. We are supposed to invest.

It’s safe to say that I am a skeptic of the glitter and gold of mutual funds and financial planners. I am an entrepreneur. If I have money to invest, I want to invest in my own projects, or in those of other entrepreneurs and businessmen who have gained my trust. To me the best types of investments can (overly) simplified into two main categories: real estate and businesses that are about to take operations to a higher level. I realize, however, that I need to have a money set aside to accumulate for these larger investments. I’ve also heard it said, and I agree, that everyone should also have at least 6 months of money storage to in case of those almost certain ‘rainy days’.

Given the nature of the different companies/projects that I am involved in, it is also very important to me that my money remains as liquid as possible. For this reason I have a small savings account where I accumulate a little bit of money each month for just such purposes.

The best savings account that I have ever worked with is ING. It’s an online bank that offers 3.3% interest on savings accounts and up to 4.7% right now on CDs. ING has great customer service and it’s really user friendly and has a ton of great insentives to keep saving with them.

ING has a great referral program where everyone that you refer (through a simple email) that starts an account with at least $250, gets instant cash of $25 and the referrer gets credited $10. It’s not much, but it’s great that they reward you on top of already getting the best savings rates I have ever seen.

So, amid my actions and plans to investment in start-up businesses and real-estate I know just as well that liquid cash stores are super important. ING is the best company I have seen yet to help meet those needs and even provides a small amount of interest… enough, in the eyes and experience of some, to even be considered an investment.