A UK study a few years back found that people who set an investment goal save 44% more each month than those who don’t. Setting a goal makes you think about your financial needs and how you’re going to achieve them. And it sets you on a timeline to get there.
4 buckets
In the old days, investment goals focused on abstract financial concepts like capital appreciation and wealth preservation. For Moneycube, it’s much more useful to define your financial goals in terms of concrete things you want to achieve. We like Betterment’s classification into 4 buckets: retirement, a safety net, general investing, and major purchases.
Each bucket has its own approach
You can think about each of your buckets differently in terms of length of time, amount of money needed, and urgency.
And once you’ve got clear on that, the type of investment to make is a lot clearer. For example, your safety net fund needs to be accessible at very short notice. Your retirement fund doesn’t. You’ll want to be sure to maximise the tax advantages of your pension money, whereas that’s less important for your emergency stash.
Easy as 1, 2, 3, 4
The priority of each bucket also becomes more obvious. If you have a decent pension arrangement in work, but have cash savings doing nothing in the bank, general investing will be high on your list. On the other hand, if you’ve no pension provision, that could be top of your list to start with.
Follow the money
Once you’ve set your investment goals, tracking them is the key to success. By tracking your goals, you know where you are, and discover quickly if you need to adapt your approach before it’s too late. Moneycube makes this easy by helping you set a goal through the investment process and measuring your progress towards it.
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