Getting closer to your financial goals: Shani's top articles from November

Morningstar’s Senior Investment Specialist focuses on defining and structuring to achieve your financial goals.

This month, my articles focused on financial goals. There are some investors that choose not to take a goals-based investing philosophy. They focus instead on the investments that they believe will generate the most wealth.

No approach is right or wrong, but Morningstar (and I) prefer an approach that adds structure to decision making around investments and that provides a yardstick and the ability to maintain and monitor a portfolio. The irony is that many of the investors that ignore goal setting and focus on amassing the most wealth possible end up chasing returns and trading too much which leads to the opposite outcome.

This month, I wrote a few articles on common financial goals. The first explored whether the salary that you need to achieve the most common financial goals. It became clear that it was not an achievable goal for many of us, but that investing can help bridge the gap between your earning potential and the financial goals that you want to achieve.

Two of the most common financial goals across generations is to own and pay off a home, and to retire comfortable. The cost of purchasing a home in Australia is prohibitive for many Australians. The Coalition's proposed solution to this is to allow Australians to access and use their superannuation to bolster their deposit. I lay down the case for why this is bad policy and why I didn't access my super to buy a home.

I took a deep-dive into why paying attention to your retirement savings early, protecting it as an asset and harnessing the power of compounding over long-time horizons can result in 25% more at retirement for some people. I also looked at what made people feel prepared for retirement, as the majority of Australians feel ill-prepared.

During the month I outlined examples of improving your approach as an investor both with shares (The secret to successful share investing), ETFs (How to tell if a fund or ETF will likely underperform) and investment structures (Using trusts to minimise tax burdens).

Several of my articles identified opportunities for investors in our coverage, and leaned on the insights from our equity research and a property expert.