Investment Information Guide

Getting started with Basic Planning

You should have a good idea about financial objectives and the priority you attach to each one, as some of these objectives will concern your protection needs. You may be interested in mainstream savings and investment objectives. Clearly, these will vary from person to person, but essentially they will fall into three broad categories:

  • Providing a lump sum sometime in the future either by investing a lump sum now or by saving regularly.
  • Providing an income now by investing a lump sum.
  • Providing an income some time in the future either by investing a lump sum now or by saving regularly.

 

You might narrow down your choice of investments and methods of saving to find the most appropriate ways to meet your financial targets. Herein a wide range of factors should be taken into account. The charts concentrate largely on risk, because this is the factor above all others, which most often seems to cause problems.

 

Numerous financial scandals have revolved around investors being seduced into products that promised exceptional returns at seemingly little or no risk. Sometimes governments issue such investments, but in the commercial world risk and reward always go hand in hand. If you want the chance of high returns, you must be prepared to take on extra risk.

The charts invite you to think of risk as a continuous scale from one to ten. If you place yourself at one, you are very averse to risk and should select savings and investments that carry the minimum of risk. Moving along the scale, you become more comfortable with risk and, at ten, you positively enjoy taking a gamble. To make a particular financial decision, your attitude towards risk may be influenced by the extent to which you are already on course to meet your most important financial targets.

You should work through the charts for each financial target you have identified; bearing in mind the priority attached to each one. For example, should you be at the start of your financial plan, needing to build up an emergency fund and with little cash to spare, you should normally be very averse to risk. As your main financial building blocks fall into place, you may be comfortable taking greater risks with the lower priority targets.

 

UK Investments - Financial, Property & Other Investments - 1998-2008

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