Fisher Investments’ Founder, Ken Fisher, Reviews How To Calculate Your Investment Time Horizon

so in capital markets and the stock market and the bond market and all kind of other markets people often talk in jargon and I find myself doing that and I find it annoying when I find myself

doing that but I do it because it's really hard for anybody in any special category whatever it is to not talk about the jargon of their category they're not used jark another category

and one of the jargon phrases in financial planning investment advice and capital markets in general is time Rising what's your time Horizon and people throw that around pretty

readily and then someone will say to me what do you mean and how do you calculate it and that's a really valid question when you're in the fifth grade they're not teaching you how do you calculate

your time Horizon so really it works pretty simply and about like this what's the primary purpose of your money what are you trying to accomplish with it

over what time is there something else you're trying to accomplish that maybe changes part of it and how would you measure that so

let's say you're 25 or let's say you're 65.

and there's a lot of options otherwise of course so you're 25 and the purpose of your money let's say is to save

so that you can buy some groceries next week well that's a really short time Horizon and you know that intuitively

let's say instead it's that it's to save because you're 25 and unlike most people at 25 today you just got married and you want to buy a house 10 years

from now you know you can't afford it now but you're thinking down the road 10 years from now that's when you're going to have kids and that's when you're going to buy your house

well if that's what the primary proof of your money is I just told you your time Horizon you follow that the more common one that I see and I'm just going to tell you when I was young

I mean when I was in my 20s every year I Had A Five-Year Plan every year my Five-Year Plan has never worked out every year I couldn't quite Envision

what the real long term was because when you're young you haven't lived a long term and young people don't like to hear that but I know it was true from when I was young and I know it's true from young people I talk to now

but as you get older up to be more like that person that's let's say 65.

now you're thinking differently and you're thinking well the primary purpose of my money and this is the most common answer I ever hear to this question is to take care of me and my spouse the

rest of our lives okay anything else oh yeah we'd like to leave some uncure offspring okay anything else well we probably want

to spend some money on our grandkids before we die too okay anything else uh well we got a little bit of money we want to lead to charity okay anything else no no that pretty

much covers it those kind of answers are real standard and common ones and I think that makes sense to you so then my next question is okay so if the primary purpose take care of you and

your spouse the rest of your lives how long you think you're going to live how long do you think your spouse is going to live so then the way I would answer that is not to look at Actuarial tables

because I don't think Actuarial tables work quite right instead what I do where I U is say how long do my parents and grandparents live and

how long can my spouse's parents and grandparents live and am I in better overall health or worse than they were and average that out

take your parents lives add a few more years to it because Medical Science improved over those years and people lived longer take your grandparents lives add a few more years

to it I'm gonna come back to that in a minute kind of average that and that's maybe how long you should expect to live and then do the same for your spouse so like

in my case you know my Grandparents were all gone between their late 70s and early 80s

my parents both made it into their 90s why overall a little bit better health conditions relative to their parents and medical stuff had improved things

that might have otherwise taken them out so they live longer that's continuing to process if you read media which is almost always aimed to scare you

they'll tell you that life expectancy is falling and on average that's true because a lot of young people are dying for risky reasons but once you get up into that 65 and up

category longevity is actually continuing to improve for all the same basic reasons elderly people now are more physically

active than they used to be decades back Medical Care is better medical science is better so you've had that time on there you've had that time on there because the most brutal thing you can actually do is to

end up dying broke and then you look at those time periods and you say to yourself oh I'm 65 what are the odds that I make it to 85.

well they're actually pretty good but if you're 65 and your parents live this time period or that time period your health is better or worse you can adjust that and if your time

period is 20 or 30 years then you say okay well my my second goal was to leave some money to my offspring okay great so when are you gonna do that and that

either pulls in your time Horizon to when you want to do that or leave it to them in your estate which is as long as the rest of your time Horizon you follow that it just means you need to have more

savings at the end so you don't die broke you die leaving at least the amount for them plus the taxes and then you say but you want to give

some money to charity well again in your estate before your estate next year that adjusts the time frame for that pocket of money but just that pocket of money and then you want to spend some money on

your grandchildren hey who doesn't want to spend money on their grandchildren so you set that aside in terms of how old your grandchildren are what you want to spend might be College might be I don't know what but that's exactly the methodology that

you go through it's a little bit like having a back of the envelope relatively informal financial plan for the years of your life and where the money wants to

go I don't believe you need to actually necessarily do a full detailed financial plan some people like to do that but it's a little bit neurotic because the most important part of all

that biggest piece I want to take care of me and my spouse the rest of our lives and how long is that and everything else triggers off

that that's 80 of everything so figure that out and you pretty well figured out what your time Horizon is if you really want to get more technical

you can get into a lot more detail uh I wrote a book once planning your financial future but there's a lot of financial planning books you could read from all kind of

people and they can get you down into more granularity if you want to be that neurotic about it but I don't think you need to be I think you can just do it real simple and then the fundamental

thing that goes with that is if your timer isn't short your Investments ought to be things that don't have too much volatility in them when your time Horizon gets longer and longer and

longer you want to allow more volatility in the Investments that you have because more volatility goes in the longer term with higher long-term returns and the longer

your time Horizon is the more you need that money to work for you and the real purpose in figuring out your time Horizon is how long is it you need your money to work for you so you keep it

working over that whole time period one of the things that people do wrongly all the time is to say oh I'm 65 so I ought to be a conservative investor right now

and not take any risk that confuses conservative with not taking any risk if you're 65 the biggest risk you have is the opportunity cost risk of not

investing in high enough return categories over a long life ahead of you so that you end up too poor an age at poverty is about the most brutal thing you can do to yourself I'll tell you one

more story and then I'll shut up and I know you never believe I'll really shut up but the fact of the matter is Ian's a girl I was writing one of my Forbes columns this is decades ago and

Jim Michaels The Marvelous editor of Forbes for 38 years and just a marvelous man who was my editor and was marvelous to me

I wrote this column where I'm talking about this topic and I said the reality is that let's say

you're 65.

in your man and you're married and your wife is 50.

and you think you're going to live 10 years and you invest your money as if you both had a 10-year time Horizon when

she coming from family that lives long is in good health and is 15 years younger than you is probably gonna live

for 30 or maybe even 40 years and you invest like it's only 10.

your now subjecting what you experience to less risk but her to the risk of aged poverty because you've only invested the

money like it's for 10 years when in fact it needs to be invested like it's for 30 or 40.

in reality that's the point you need to think about the second of the two of you which is longer and plan for that because it's really that person's

longevity that you're aiming for when you figure out your time Horizon I know this has been a long Babel and a lot that you didn't want to hear but thank you very much for listening to me subscribe to the Fisher investment

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