Last Updated on February 12, 2022 at 6:22 pm
Financial goals maybe arranged into three categories.
(a) Goals based on a one-time expense. Classic example is a marriage. You invest to create a corpus, which evaporates around the time of the wedding. Any event that is unlikely to occur again or occurs infrequently would fall in this category. For example, a child’s under-graduate and post-graduate education expenses, a business goal etc.
(b) Goals based on recurring expenses or any event that occurs with a well-established regularity. These could range from
- a holiday that you like to take every couple of years
- an expensive medical test that needs to be repeated often
- school/colleges fees
- insurance premium etc.
Among these, you may realise that
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- there are goals that are subject to inflationary increases each year (holidays, medical tests)
- there are goals that are subject to inflation but only change (often by a large amount) every few years. School or college fees is a good example of such goals.
- there are goals that do not depend on inflation, for example, term insurance premium.
Of course, there may be other factors that affect the expenses involved but those depend on circumstances and hence cannot be quantified.
(c) Retirement! In both the above categories, the corpus save is utilised in full when the need arises.
Retirement is a very different ball game. A retirement corpus must be capable of meeting the retiree’s expenses for each year in retirement. That is the expenses drawn from the corpus must match the inflationary increases. In order to do this the corpus must also be invested suitably. You can learn more about this here: How retirement calculators work
There are many resources available for goal-based investing at freefincal.
One-time financial goals may be planned with these goal planners
- Our flagship tool: Robo advisory template
- Another version of the goal planner is also available with this versatile SIP calculator
- Beginners may benefit from: A Step-By-Step Guide to Long Term Goal-Based Investing
- Advanced articles on goal-based investing are found here: Goal based Investing: 4-part series
I would like to add a recurring financial goals calculator to this collection.
- You can use this for goals that repeat with any frequency: once a year, once in 2/3/4/5 … years.
- Two recurring goals can be calculated.
- The results are tabulated in a single cash flow chart.
This is now incorporated into our robo advisory tool