All successful gardeners will understand the need to regularly tend their plants, shrubs and lawns in order to ensure a garden can flourish. For investors, taking a similar approach to their financial affairs can also bear fruit by ensuring their investment portfolios don’t become neglected and, as a result, underperform.
Weeding, sowing…
As with a garden, your investment portfolio requires regular careful attention in order to ensure it continues to grow. Typical tasks include weeding out any perennially underperforming funds and switching to potentially more profitable ones. For those with new money to invest, sowing the seeds of your portfolio with carefully selected additional new investments, can really spruce things up.
Pruning and Trimming
Another important task is pruning. This will ensure your investment portfolio stays balanced and continues to fully reflect both your current and long-term financial goals as well as any changes in your appetite for risk.
It may also require taking profits at certain points in time to ensure you are using any potential tax allowances.
However carefully your initial range of investments were selected, your portfolio will inevitably get out of shape over time. This creates an ongoing need to regularly review the allocation of different asset classes, such as cash, equities, bonds and property. Such a review may result in the trimming back of certain assets in order to restore balance to your portfolio.
Help is at hand
Many people now seek professional help to create and maintain their garden and it’ wise for investors to do the same. With ongoing political and economic uncertainties causing increased market volatility, there has never been a more important time to seek professional financial advice. Keep in touch, so that we can help you keep your investment portfolio in full bloom.
Clifford Osborne are Independent Financial Advisors (IFA) based in Eastbourne, East Sussex, offering investment advice and review, early retirement advice, pension advice, mortgage advice and more. Our clients often come from Uckfield, Lewes, Brighton, Tunbridge Wells, Hastings, Bexhill, Newhaven, Seaford, Crowborough and further afield. Please read our blog or get in touch for investment tips and advice.
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It is important to take professional advice before making any decision relating to your personal finances. Information within this blog is based on our current understanding of taxation and can be subject to change in future.
It does not provide individual tailored investment advice and is for guidance only. Some rules may vary in different parts of the UK; please ask for details. We cannot assume legal liability for any errors or omissions it might contain. Levels and bases of, and reliefs from, taxation are those currently applying or proposed and are subject to change; their value depends on the individual circumstances of the investor.
The value of investments can go down as well as up and you may not get back the full amount you invested. The past is not a guide to future performance and past performance may not necessarily be repeated.
If you withdraw from an investment in the early years, you may not get back the full amount you invested. Changes in the rates of exchange may have an adverse effect on the value or price of an investment in sterling terms if it is denominated in a foreign currency. Taxation depends on individual circumstances as well as tax law and HMRC practice which can change.
The information contained within the blog is for information purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
The purpose of the blog is to provide technical and general guidance and should not be interpreted as a personal recommendation or advice.