Long-term Saving & Investing

Why be concerned about long-term savings and investing? Because retirement isn’t free.

Retirement is the most expensive thing you will buy during your lifetime. Life expectancies continue to increase — a healthy 65-year-old can expect to live 20+ years beyond in retirement. Social Security was never meant to be someone’s sole source of retirement income, but part of a multifaceted retirement plan made up of other savings accumulated over the life of a person’s career. The days of fully-funded retirement provided by employers are gone. You will need to provide most of your retirement “nest egg” by saving from your own paycheck. When done well, long-term saving and investing is a great way to help build a secure future. No one is too young to prepare for retirement. Simply put, the sooner you start; the less you need to save. Why? Because of a little concept known as compounding.

Compounding is the ability for your money to make more money over time. In fact, Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t, pays it.” Simply said, compounding allows the money you invest today to continue to grow as your reinvest those earnings into more investments.

Once you’ve started saving and investing for the long term, you will have to decide how to invest your nest egg. There are three important concepts for long-term success and the relationship managers at F&M Trust can help you make wise choices with each of them.

• Asset allocation is simply deciding how to invest among the three major asset classes of stocks (also referred to as equities), bonds (also referred to as fixed income), and cash. Here’s a handy tool to help begin planning asset allocation.

• Diversification is simply spreading the investment risk among each of the asset classes and into different investments. Ever heard the saying, “Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket?” That’s diversification!

• Rebalancing is key to minimizing risk and maximizing total return over the long-term. It is simply bringing your portfolio back into line with your original asset allocation. Because asset classes and investments perform differently over time your actual investment allocation may not match your planned allocation as time goes on. When you rebalance, you bring these investment allocations back into line.

F&M Trust provides investment management services to make the asset allocation, diversification, and rebalancing decisions with you. Our relationship managers are here to help.