؟ What Are Your Investment Goals
by Laura Maery Gold and Dan Post from Boot Your Broker!
The first step in creating a portfolio strategy is deciding what it is you're investing for. Unless you've got the Midas urge to simply own money, there's certainly something you're hoping to do with those assets.
Your investment goals can be short term—a down payment for a house, for example, or next year's college tuition, or an overseas vacation two years down the road.
Perhaps your goals are intermediate term. College tuition might be eight or nine years away. Retirement might be 10 years into the future. You could hope to turn your hobby into a full-time business.
Or it may be that your goals are very long term. You're 20 years from retirement. You want to leave an inheritance for your grandchildren. You want to be free to travel in your golden years.
Your first task as an investor is to decide what exactly you hope to achieve in your investment program.
The goal-setting process is simple:
List your top three or four investment goals. Think short, intermediate, and long term. Make time to discuss this critical issue with your spouse.
Create a timeline for achieving your goals. It needn't be tremendously precise, but it should reflect your basic expectations about the direction and tone of your life. No investor, no matter how savvy, can predict with accuracy interest, inflation, taxes, or most of the other factors that influence the future value of your investments—so recognize the need for some flexibility in your timeline.
Calculate the return you'll require to meet those goal
Once you've decided what you want to accomplish, you're ready to decide what you're willing to do to get there.
0 التعليقات:
إرسال تعليق