Seeing as we are half way into the New Year, I saw it fit that we look at your personal/family’s financial targets for the year. Often times financial targets fall within most people’s New Year resolutions, including mine but how often do we stick to them.

Sadly for most of us failure to meet these targets stems from having the willpower to want to change our financial circumstances but not having the knowledge of how to get to our desired position, what would be called strategy.

Thanks to a whole wide range of reading and personal experience I have found the route, if I may call it that to get to my desired position and in this blog I will share with you what you may/may not have known but weren’t sure how to use it as part of your strategy towards getting to your financial target. So I hear you ask, ‘What’s the strategy already?’ What you will find below is a breakdown of the targets in line with the stage you/family maybe in life, namely:

• Young, single professional
• Married couple with/without kids
• Senior professional approaching retirement
• Retired professional on pension

In this first blog I will focus on the young, single professional whom we will call Grant. It is assumed Grant recently completed his tertiary education and falls in the age group of 21-30yrs.At this age the world’s literally at Grant’s feet , nothing can hold him back from whatever he sets out to achieve. Interestingly poor financial planning could leave him thinking otherwise. Assuming you are in the same position as our guy Grant to achieve your financial targets at this level you need to give yourself  a date by which you will have achieved your targets be it paying for further studies, buying yourself your first vehicle, spoiling your parents or going on your first self sponsored holiday etc. Having made a timeline for each look at how you are to achieve this, the strategy.  So now I hear you asking what my options to achieve these targets are. Below are some of the options available to you to raise that much needed extra money to reach your financial targets:

• Investing in the Stock Market
• Investing on the Money Market
• Unit Trusts
• Savings Account deposits
• Joining a Money club

Based on the above, albeit limited options your decision on the strategy you are to apply ultimately depends on your appetite for risk and patience (timeline to achieve your targets). Being in the same boat as our guy Grant, your age gives you the advantage of having a high risk appetite as you can always rebuild your portfolio in the unexpected and unfortunate event that it crumbles. You therefore can look at riskier investment vehicles offering high returns, to maximize on the limited funds available to you for investing. Ultimately if you are risk averse the stock market offers a safe but high growth potential haven for you in the long-term. How often have you read in the daily papers and business journals about how much our local (Zimbabwe Stock Exchange) is undervalued? So why haven’t you taken advantage of this? By low- sell high, that should be your mantra when entering the stock market and there’s no better time to get into it than now. So sure you cannot afford to hire a portfolio manager just yet, but what you and I know for a fact is that you have common sense and can observe what is happening around you and in the economy at large. And not forgetting that there is a plethora of free information sources available to you for free such as this blog.

Having said that I leave it to you to work out how you are going to get there based on the strategies I have given you above.

 Disclaimer: Although due care and research has been taken into information published in this blog the author of this blog will not be held responsible for any financial decisions that may be taken based on the material contained in this or any other articles on this blog.