Savings Plan

Regular Savings Plans

Incorporating a savings plan that involves additional contributions being made at regular intervals can be a simple yet effective means of building your wealth. Some of the potential benefits associated with this type of savings plan are:

• Compounding returns
• Less impact on your finances by making smaller but regular contributions
• Dollar cost averaging
• Appropriate for short term, medium term or long term goals

Education Funding

Your children’s education is important, but the lifetime costs of that education can also be significant. That’s why it’s important to be steadily saving and investing for their education as they grow. If you start contributing today while they’re still little, you won’t be hit hard when they enter those expensive high school and tertiary years.

An Education Savings Plan via a managed fund can provide for your children throughout their entire education. A PGFS Advisor can help you choose between conservative and high-growth investment options, which are appropriate for your individual circumstances, as well as calculate the savings required to meet your children’s education needs.

Compound Interest

Compound interest is simply when interest is added to the investment principal so that from that moment on, the interest that has been added also earns interest. This addition of interest to the principal is called compounding.

To compound successfully you need time to allow the power of compounding to work for you.

Let’s look at an example. Sam invested $10,000 into a fixed interest investment that paid 15% per annum over a 15 year period. He has the choice of having the $1500 annual interest income paid into his savings, or re-investing back into the investment account.

Simply by re-investing his interest, and making use of the power of compounding, Sam will come out ahead by approximately $48,900. Put another way, if he had chosen to have his interest paid out annually, his investment worth would have tripled after 15 yrs. By reinvesting his interest returns, he would multiply it 8 times!

These estimates are for illustrative purposes only but are aimed at illustrating 2 main principles. Firstly, the powerful benefits compounding your returns can provide you with and secondly, the earlier you start (that is, the longer the investment timeframe) the greater these benefits will be.

PGFS can tailor an effective investment strategy that will harness the benefits of compounding returns as part of your wealth creation plans.

Managed Funds Using a Regular Savings Plan

Many managed funds offer the convenience of a regular savings plan so you can add to your investment on a regular basis. Regular investments can often be deducted straight from your bank account.

Investing your savings into a managed fund on a regular basis provides the benefits associated with Dollar Cost Averaging. This means that you don’t have to worry about where share prices or interest rates are headed. You simply invest a set amount of money on a regular basis over a long period of time.

Below is a simple example that illustrates how it works based on investing $100 per month into a managed investment that initially had a unit price of $10. Over the next few months, the market falls, (causing the unit price to drop) before recovering to its original value.

At the end of the 5 months you have 65 units each worth $10, so you have $650. You have invested $500, so your profit is $150 even though the unit price is the same as when you first invested.