With interest rates at historic lows, investing could be a good way to make your money work harder and help you to reach your financial goals quicker. A solid investment plan is key to building your wealth. Before you start investing it is helpful to have a clear plan and to understand what you are hoping to achieve from your investments.
Investment planning is the process of defining your short and long term financial goals and objectives, and creating a plan to use your financial resources to meet your goals.
Investment planning should be tailored to your own individual circumstances taking your objectives and risk tolerance into account. This will identify types of investments that are suitable for you. The main principles of investing are determining how much risk you are comfortable with, determine how much you can invest monthly and diversifying your portfolio.
Consider your investment time frames
After you identifying your goals you should clarify your investment timeline, this may be different for different goals. For example, if you are investing to save for a house deposit you may have a shorter time frame of five years. Whereas investing for your retirement will have a much longer time frame meaning you are likely to be able to take more risk.
In general you should aim to hold your investments for at least five years to give your assets the best change of riding out any market volatility and hopefully a greater chance to grow.
How much should I invest?
You should be prepared for the unexpected and set aside a cash reserve as an emergency fund. This can be used for short term unexpected costs such as car repairs or your boiler breaking down. Our Financial Advisers usually recommend having 3-6 months of living expenses saved in cash in case your situation changes, for example if you lose your job.
Once you have enough cash saved, you should consider investing any other excess money to give more opportunity to grow your savings over the long term.
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What types of investments are there?
There are thousands of different types of investments, the most common are cash, equities, funds, bonds and property. At Four Wealth Management, your Financial Adviser will consider all the options available to you and select those that are best aligned to your goals.
A good investment plan is likely to contain multiple types of investments to keep your portfolio diverse and mitigate risk.
Do you want to grow your investments or receive income?
If your goal is to receive regular income from your investments then you can choose investments that pay dividends or you may receive interest payments. However, if your goal is to grow your assets you may decide to reinvest any income generated.
How do I diversify my investments?
By setting clear goals, your financial adviser will match a mixture of investments to each goal and structure them tax-efficiently.
Spreading your money across different investments and asset classes will help to diversify your portfolio and minimise risk as you are not over exposed to one market or sector. If one of your investments falls in value, another might gain value meaning that losses are offset and your portfolio is more likely to stay in line with your goals.
Review your investment plan
Reviewing your investment portfolio is an important part of investment planning.
At Four Wealth Management, we understand your personal circumstances are likely to change over time and this may affect your investment objectives. For example, you may start a family or inherit some money. We believe it is important to regularly review your portfolio performance against your objectives and to understand any changes in your circumstances that may mean your portfolio needs to be altered.
We offer clients an annual face-to-face review meeting to determine if their portfolio is still on track and if any adjustments need to be made.
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Create a bespoke Investment Plan today
Contact a Financial Adviser at Four Wealth Management today on 0117 973 0500 or email fourwm@sjpp.co.uk to book a no-obligation review meeting to discuss investment planning. The initial meeting will last approximately one hour and can be conducted on the telephone, at our office in Bristol or at your home address.
The value of an investment with St. James’s Place will be directly linked to the performance of the funds selected and may fall as well as rise. You may get back less than the amount invested.
