Without a financial plan, we tend to make money and investment decisions in a vacuum – choosing spending, business, investment, and insurance options without a clear understanding of how one affects the other. A goal-based investment approach will help you stay focused on your various targets within your time frame. Horizon Wealth Solutions creates strategies to help you reach your objectives, by designing specific portfolios that are fully diversified to help mitigate market risk.

Once you have made the decision to save, you will need to invest and grow your savings so that when you need the funds later (for retirement, college, vacation, health, or legacy) they will be there to meet the need. But which types of investments are right for you, and which are the real costs of investments? How do you research your options? These are great questions, which should be discussed one-on-one with a professional advisor.

Most self-managed investors (and even a few advisors) will not allow money invested on behalf of themselves or their clients to work over the long term. Instead, they go through the fear-hope-greed cycle.

When the market is at a low cycle, they fear losing money, so they pull it out of their investments. As the market begins to rise, they regain their confidence, and return to the market in hopes that it will continue to rise. As the market peaks, the greed factor sets in, and they do not reallocate or rebalance their investments. The market then begins to decline, and they hope that it will recover so they ride it out until they reach a point of fear. They then sell the investment, at a loss.

Perhaps you can relate to this investing cycle of buy high and sell low: the results over the long run are not pretty. Investing needs to be viewed as a long-term endeavor; however, this is not to say that securities should never be bought or sold. It is to say that one should not try to time the markets.

Although the market does rise and fall frequently, we do know that historically the market is much higher today than it was 20 years ago. In fact, over time your market risk actually declines. The truth is, the longer you are willing to stay in the market, the lower the risk becomes and thus higher the potential reward becomes.

So what is the big secret that successful investors know? Invest early, invest often, take the funds out slowly, and be patient. This action requires discipline and control of emotions. A trusted Financial Advisor can be incredibly helpful in this process, providing professional advice, while taking the emotion (fear and greed) out of the equation.