Determining your reasons for investing now will help you work out your investment goals and influence how you manage your investments in future.

If you’re investing with a goal in mind, you’ve probably got a date in mind too. If you’ve got a few goals, some may be further away in time than others, so you’ll probably have different strategies for your different investments. Investments rise and fall in value, so it’s sensible to use cash savings for your short-term goals and invest for your longer-term goals.

Short term

Most investments need at least a five-year commitment. But there are other options if you don’t want to invest for this long, such as cash savings.

Medium term

If you can commit your money for at least five years, a selection of investments might suit you. Your investments make up your ‘portfolio’ and could contain a mix of funds investing in shares, bonds and other assets, or a mixture of these, which are carefully selected and monitored for performance by professional fund managers.

Long term

Let’s say you start investing for your retirement when you’re fairly young. You might have 20 or 30 years before you need to start drawing money from your investments. With time on your side, you might consider riskier funds that can offer the chance of bigger returns in exchange for an increased risk of losing your money.

As you get closer to retirement, you might sell off some of these riskier investments and move to safer options with the aim of protecting your investments and their returns. How much time you’ve got to work with will have a big impact on the decisions you make. As a general rule, the longer you hold investments, the better the chance they’ll outperform cash – but there can never be a guarantee of this.