Josh Hoskin Smart Money [email protected]

If you don't have a goal you can't achieve anything.

Goals have got to be measureable and progress towards or away from your goals needs to be noticed. Your adviser should help you set these goals and hopefully help you monitor your performance towards the goals, just like a teacher or personal trainer.

A recent column on financial matters discussed benchmarking and investments. Essentially what was being said was if you want to monitor your investments, a good way of doing so is comparing the performance to the relevant benchmark.

A benchmark for your information is typically some index put together by an organisation to track the performance of a market, for example the NZX 50 is an index that measures the performance of the NZ Share Market.

If your portfolio has performed in line with this index on a gross basis but net of adviser fees then you should be happy, if not then you should ask questions. Of course then the question is how long should you endure underperformance? That is a hard one to define but if your adviser can give you reasons why there is underperformance and you are comfortable with then you might be able to ride this out in the short term because changing portfolios can often bring about cost as well.

If you want to talk about investing and goal setting, give us a call.