This story is more about saving than investing. If your net worth is less than $10,000, you need to save, save and save some more! Future articles will address larger sums.

I have been asked many times in person and in the comments section about how to get started as an investor. Since it is essential to have something to invest besides your time, two things above all are required: Educate yourself, and be thrifty in your spending habits.

Most people reading the AOL Money & Finance section probably have ten grand to invest. If you do not currently have $10,000 to invest you are in trouble and there is no time to waste.

First: Reduce spending on extras, even extras you think you need to live.

According to audience figures at Alexa which measures traffic and page views at hundreds of thousands of internet websites, many of the Time Warner online properties are having trouble maintaining their audiences.

Alexa measures audience for the most recent day, a weekly average, and a three month average. The measurement system also shows the change in the three month average versus the previous three months. Alexa's system tracks usage on millions of toolbars downloaded onto PCs by their users. There has always been some debate about whether the figures are as accurate as numbers from some of Alexa's competitors. A "sense check" of the top sites on Alexa does make sense. Worldwide, Yahoo!.com is ranked first, followed by MSN, Google, baidu.com, qq.com, MySpace and sina.com. The presence of several large Chinese websites seems logical.

The Alexa system competes to some extent with the two large web audience measurement firms, Neilsen/NetRatings and Comscore.

The figures are particularly important now, especially as AOL migrates from a subscription-supported model to one that relies primarily on internet advertising.

My sister Hannah is the answer to the question, why are AOL's subscriptions falling? A dabbler in the internet, she and her family paid for AOL dialup for years; even though she's now married with a real job, she's kept her AOL address from when she still lived at home with my parents. Last month, she called us to ask about this wonderful world of high-speed internet, and a few days later, Comcast came into her home and switched her over. She cancelled her AOL account.

Many like Hannah have kept their AOL account just for the email address. And though two-thirds of U.S. internet users now have high-speed internet access, AOL's user base is very different; approximately one-third of AOL users are high-speed customers, according to the AP. Yet Time Warner is rumored to be considering a very radical plan: making the coveted aol.com addresses free for users who have switched to other providers' high-speed services.

With Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft all offering a wide variety of free email options, and AOL's content now available to all comers, competitive strategy seems to dictate that Time Warner's decision should be already be made. Is board, who might say yes to the plan in their meeting this Thursday, will have to weigh the potential dollar losses (said to be $1 billion between now and 2009) against the untold customer goodwill and increased "eyeballs."