Aligning investments with your financial goals

Create an investment strategy that supports your unique goals and sets you on a path toward long-term success.

Whether you’re planning for education expenses, saving for a new home or remodel or preparing for retirement, it’s critical to align your investment strategy with your financial goals.

An Ameriprise financial advisor can help create a personalized investment strategy that helps you achieve what's most important to you.  

Get started with these key steps:

1. Define your goals

Big or small, short- or long-term, your goals help you prioritize how you save and spend your money. Your investment strategy is designed to support these goals.

Spend time thinking about what's important to you now and over the next 5, 10 and 30 years. From there, you can get more specific about the costs and the approximate timeline you'll need to reach your goals, whether it’s planning for a wedding, funding a large purchase or enjoying a confident retirement.

2. Identify your time horizon

Once you've identified your financial goals, define your time horizon to help determine which investment instruments will be most appropriate for you:

• Short-term goals: This includes goals you hope to achieve in the next 1‒3 years, such as saving for a vacation or a car.
• Medium-term goals: These types of goals may not occur for another 3‒5 years, such as paying off student loan debt, planning for a wedding or buying a new home.
• Long-term goals: These goals may take 5 years or more — sometimes decades — to achieve. Saving for retirement, funding a loved one’s education or planning to leave a legacy will typically fall into this category.

Whether a goal falls into the short-, medium- or long-term category will depend on factors, like the size of the goal, your income and your other financial obligations. Your goals may even change over time depending on your life circumstances. Regularly reviewing your goals and investments can help ensure you’re saving for what’s most important to you. You can always make changes if needed.

Learn more: How to save and pay for a big purchase

3. Confirm your risk tolerance

Risk tolerance is the level of unpredictability, volatility and losses you’re willing to accept as an investor to achieve a particular investment return. In short, it’s how you feel about investment gains and losses, opportunities and setbacks. Risk tolerance runs along a continuum: The more tolerant you are of risk, the more aggressive you are considered to be as investor. The less tolerant you are of risk, the more conservative you are considered to be as an investor.

Your time horizon is also a factor in determining your risk tolerance. If you have a shorter time horizon, you may choose more conservative investment vehicles with a lower risk. If you have many years to invest, your investments may reflect a more aggressive position. Overall, knowing your individual risk tolerance with your time horizon can help clarify what types of investments may be appropriate to achieve your goals.

4. Know the basic building blocks of a portfolio

An investment portfolio typically consists of a mix of stocks, bonds, cash and alternatives. These four investment types are also referred to as “asset classes.” Your portfolio is constructed based on a personalized mix of assets that work together to achieve your individual financial goals, based on your risk tolerance and time horizon.

Learn more: Asset classes: The building blocks of an investment portfolio

5. Embrace asset allocation and diversification

Asset allocation and diversification are two strategies that work together to help you grow your investments over the long-term. Through asset allocation and diversification, your financial advisor will include a variety of asset classes and investment types in your portfolio to reduce your exposure to the performance of any single investment or market sector. This can help mitigate risk during times of market volatility and reduce the appeal of making emotional investing decisions.

Learn more: Why should an investor consider diversification and asset allocation?

6. Understand key investment principles

Given the vast amount of financial information and choices available today, investing can often seem highly complex, even intimidating. Yet the basic philosophies for creating an effective long-term investment strategy remain straightforward. Having a good understanding of foundational principles like the value of staying invested amid volatility, the power of compounding and the benefit of systematic saving and investing can help you stick with your strategy to achieve your goals.

Learn more: Key investment principles for long-term investor

7. Regularly review your strategy

Finally, you’ll want to ensure your investing strategy evolves with you. And one critical way to do that is through an annual review, which gives you a holistic opportunity to assess your overall investment strategy, so that you can make changes as your financial priorities, income and life change.

Conducting this evaluation with a financial advisor can be particularly beneficial, as they can identify potential opportunities to invest more or rebalance your portfolio to ensure it remains aligned with your asset allocation targets.

Learn more: Why rebalancing your portfolio regularly is important

Get advice that starts with you

An Ameriprise financial advisor will listen to your concerns, get to know what matters most to you and provide personalized recommendations for an investment strategy that aligns with your goals, reflects your values and helps you stay on track through all types of market conditions.