At this time of year, it’s useful to review your investments against your goals and plan ahead for the long-term. This doesn’t need to be complicated, so we’ve prepared five quick tips to help you get started.
1. Refresh Your Goals
We believe setting goals is a vital, and often overlooked, part of investing. The start of a new year is an excellent time to review the goals you’ve set yourself to make sure they’re still relevant.
You may have experienced change in 2015 and that should be reflected in your 2016 goals. Whether that’s buying a new home, having children or getting closer to retirement. If your goals do need updating, speak to your financial adviser.
2. Check Your Performance
As well as setting goals, we believe it’s important to monitor your progress against those goals. That’s why we built our exclusive personal client sites to give you 24/7 access to your accounts.
By checking your investments regularly, you remain engaged with them at all times. This helps you make long-term decisions about your investments rather than snap judgements.
3. Plan for Volatility
Volatility and investing go hand-in-hand and you’ll need to prepare yourself to deal with periods of high and low volatility.
True Potential Investments’ Chief Investment Office, Colin Beveridge, says of the year ahead:
“We are seeing continued support for any markets that are receiving Government stimulus in the form of Quantitative Easing, such as Europe and Japan.
“With so many moving parts affecting stock markets, our investment partners see heightened volatility over the coming months leading to tougher trading conditions but also opportunities for long-term investors to purchase assets at favourable prices.”
4. Consider Multi-Asset Investing
When we consider just how difficult it is to predict markets, diversification has always been an important part of investing. Professional Fund Managers often take a multi-asset approach to building portfolios for investors, making sure they have the right amount of diversification for their chosen risk profile.
By diversifying by investment style, asset class and geographic region, investors can manage volatility over time and smooth out returns. Our own Managed Portfolio Series takes this approach by dynamically rebalancing its assets to control volatility and keep investors in the correct risk band. Plus, unlike many providers, we don’t charge any additional fee for investment management.
5. Take Your Chances to Top Up
We built impulseSave®, our world-first investment top up technology to take advantage of everything we’ve covered in this article. By setting a goal and tracking performance, you power impulseSave® to calculate any ‘gap to goal’ that may appear. If it does, you can top up the exact amount, down to the nearest penny, to get back on track.
impulseSave® is especially powerful in volatile markets as it enables you to buy more at low prices. This is because when markets fall, you may find yourself sitting below your goal with a ‘gap’ to close. However, when markets rise, you may not see a gap and so can avoid topping up when prices are high.
We hope these five tips help you make more from your investments in 2016. If you’re already a True Potential client, you can speak to your financial adviser at any time through your personal client site.
If you think you might benefit from professional financial advice, you can search our directory to find a local qualified adviser.
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