How to achieve your financial goals

published 10 July 2012

What are you investing for?

Don't worry. This isn't some deep philosophical question; it means just what it says what are you saving your money for?

Because there's one very simple thing you have to decide: if you want the money back within five years, then you need to save it that means in a nice, safe, but boring deposit account. Ifyou don't need the money for at least five years, then you can invest it in the stock market, for example.

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Why the difference?

Because when you invest in the stock market (or any other market), there's no guarantee you'll get your money back. Especially in the short term. It's risky, and you could easily lose money rather than make more of it.

And if you pick the wrong time to invest, you could be waiting for much longer than five years to get your money back.

I've been digging through the latest edition of the annual Barclays Equity Gilts Study.This report shows how various 'asset classes' cash, sharesand bonds have performed over the past century or so.

Some of the data is eye-opening.

If you'd invested in the UK stock market at the end of 1973, you'd have lost more than half of your money by the end of 1974. That's right more than half your money gone in a year! If you invested at the end of 1972, it would have taken 11 years before you were back to even.

More recently, anyone who invested at the end of 1999, near the height of the technology bubble, is still waiting to make a return on their money. (These figures assume that any dividend income is re-invested).

That's pretty scary. You might not want to take that kind of risk.

In the short term, that's a very sensible attitude. That's why you put money you are saving for a deposit on a house into a savings account, not the stock market.

Trouble is, you can't avoid risk completely. Fluctuating stock markets are one problem, but when it comes to long-term savings, there's another big risk that can gobble up your hard-earned cash.

I'm talking about inflation.

Staying out of the stockmarkets won't protect you from inflation

Let's say prices are rising at 5% a year. 5% of £1,000 is £50.So in a year's time, you'll need £1,050 to buy the same amount of stuff that £1,000 will get you now. £1,050 is a bigger number than £1,000. In financial jargon, the nominal' amount is larger. But in real terms' (taking inflation into account) you are no wealthier at all.

You need to beat inflation which means taking risks

Let's look at some more figures from the Barclays Equity Gilt Study.

Assuming you re-invest dividends, there isn't a single 20-year period since 1960 where you would have made a real' loss in UK shares.

You can't say that for deposit accounts (cash), or for gilts (UK government debt). Even in the worst 20-year period for stocks, £100 invested in shares was worth £143. For gilts, the figure is £62, and for cash, it's £96.

As for the best 20-year periods for each asset class: £100 invested in UK shares grew into £1,224. (From 1974 1994).

£100 in gilts grew to £487 (1981 2001). And over the same period for cash, you'd have ended up with £195.

Of course we're not comparing like-with-like time periods here. There are good and bad times to buy various asset classes. Plus there are other important types of investments.The Barclays study doesn't look at property or gold, for example.

However, the fact remains: if you are investing for the long run for retirement in other words then the markets, not a savings account, are the place to put your money.

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.