Article by Sherin Dev; Follow me in Twitter or Facebook
In the previous article, I have shared the idea about when to start investing. Now, here is a short insight to the next question, “Where to Invest Your Money?” At the very first view, this question seems very simple as we all aware about most investment instruments like stocks, various types of mutual funds, government and private sector bonds, Bank Fixed Deposits and many other investment vehicles.
Knowing about all the investment instruments along with return and risks associated to each of them are not sufficient to take necessary investment decisions or create a core portfolio. Knowing investment possibilities and its differences wouldn’t make anyone a good investor. Instead, suitability of various investment options depend on various individual factors should be analyzed and identified. Here is a list of factors that should come under your consideration before taking any investment decisions or creating an investment portfolio for your life.
Age
Age is a major factor to consider when select and combine investment instruments. A person with 21 years with his first job can invest hugely into the stock and stock market related instruments as his age allow him to build money later if anything bad happens to this investments. In the same time, a person near to his pension would not be able to take that much risk as he doesn’t have enough time in front to build money again if loses happens! A portfolio should be thus balanced by considering the age as a major factor.
Risk Capacity
A person who has enough risk taking capacity can invest huge chunk of money to the stock and/or stock related instruments than anyone who have low risk taking capacity. To make this idea clear, a young person who has no commitment can take more risk than one who has family and commitments. Age doesn’t matter in such scenario. To understand your risk taking capacity, approach a good financial planner based on his qualities. He can easily analysis and help to identify right investment instruments for you.
Goal
As I have informed in my previous article, whenever there is a goal, people would move to achieve that. If not goal, there wouldn’t be any actions. Investments are the best options to achieve your long term financial goals. Thus, ‘goal’ is an important factor to consider when constructing your portfolio. For an example, if you want to build a house after 20 years, and made a bank FD of 10k today for that purpose, I don’t think you are able to construct even the foundation of your house after these 20 years with the amount receiving from that FD. To achieve such goals easily, one should plan the right portfolio by adding right instruments that able to build sufficient wealth after 20 years!
Conclusion
There are various factors like investment methods, if it is one time or regularly, portfolio re-balancing etc. should come under consideration. About mentioned three are the major factors to consider and shouldn’t avoid. Avoiding any of them may have huge negative impact to the portfolio which later cause to not meet any of the investment goals.
If you have any other factor that required high concentration at the time of taking investment decisions, share with us.