How to plan investments to meet your Financial Goals?

Planning investment needs a lot of planning. From research to budgeting to finding appropriate investment instruments, a lot of thought and permutations – combinations need to be factored in a plan that will help you reach your financial goals and eventually your dreams. Let’s start,

Step-by-step guide,

Reasons for financial planning

The first step when planning investments is to identify the underlying factors that drive you to do so. These inherent and important reasons why you need to create wealth can revolve around several factors, such as:

One needs to be clear as to why financial planning is needed and what the real motives are. Upon pondering, the below reasons will be apparent,

Need for Goals: We all want something out of life, Education, Car, house, vacation, etc these are the primary reasons and one should not only know but be sufficient driven to achieve them.

Retirement planning: This is becoming more and more critical with rising healthcare. You will atleast need 70% of the amount when your career is in full-swing for retirement, so you can maintain the same standard of living.

Beating Inflation: Inflation feeds off on savings. The key need for financial planning is to beat inflation because the costs are always going up.

Power of Compounding: The earlier you start the better because compounding needs a good head start of 10-15 years to show its magic in-terms of multiplying your money.

Your goals

This cannot be overstressed; we cannot make investments without certain outcomes in mind. That’s like firing without a target. Not only we need to have clear tangible goals like home, vacation etc we need to start early too.

Identify Risks

Risk capacity is directly linked to age. The younger you are the higher your risk tolerance. The portfolio should be accordingly set-up with enough equity to give you the edge and some steady investments too. The portfolio will keep on changing until retirement when the entire portfolio is sort of reverse.

Of course the above is a general rule of thumb but risk appetite should be assessed. Neither can we have 100% equity portfolios or all eggs in one basket.

Asset classes

There are different types of asset classes to matching varying investment needs. Investors should look at the right mixture of debt and equity in tandem with the risk profile.

Portfolio rebalancing is a great feature that must be used to protect from overexposure or under returns. This feature keeps your portfolio optimized for maximum returns.

What are your long-term goals?

Long-term goals again need a combination of different asset classes, so identifying them is crucial to the plan.

Index Funds

Index fund mimic the indices and is great for diversification. Index funds also need no monitoring as they move the way the market moves. They are passively managed and carry low to medium risk and they are ideal for long term goals.

Summary

Investment planning is a time-consuming but ultimately satisfying process. One has to sit with clear agenda to be financially independent and create wealth. Once that though is thorough ingrained in your system, rest is research and planning.

We have to start early for our financial plans to take off and give them enough time to grow. The Power of Compounding will only kick-in after you’ve had a steady start of 10-15 years. This is when the creation of wealth start or more importantly money starts working for you.

In an increasingly complex world, this is the best thing one can do to secure their future. You can get a family member to assist you with this project.