Scott Ford, founder and CEO of Cornerstone Wealth Management Group
How fast would your investments need to grow over the next 10 years to allow you to reach your financial goals? Would they need to grow by 2% or closer to 8%? How likely are your current investments to hit that mark?
If you’re like most people, you may have no idea what rate of return your investments would need to produce to pursue your financial goals. While many people rate money as important to their happiness as their health, they often lack concrete measurements for their financial health. Without a clear objective, it’s difficult to create successful investment strategies.
That’s why we developed our Family Benchmark measurement. Your Family Benchmark is the key to your financial plan. It is the rate of return necessary to pursue your financial goals. Before you can pursue an investment strategy, you’ll need to know your family benchmark so you can plan to invest your assets appropriately.
What is Your Family Benchmark?
At Cornerstone Wealth Management Group, we believe that advancing and protecting a lifetime of wealth begins with determining your Family Benchmark—the individual rate of return you need in order to move towards your goals and objectives with confidence.
How can you tell if your strategy is truly designed to fit your goals and income needs if it’s simply benchmarked to one of the leading market indices? Benchmarking to an index like the S&P 500 performance may actually provide little relevance where your personal goals and risk tolerance are concerned.
That’s because an index doesn’t take certain factors into account that play a significant role in determining your financial picture now and throughout your years in retirement. These include:
- Your investment timeframe
- Your risk tolerance
- Your tax situation
- Your life expectancy
- Your lifestyle preferences
- Expected healthcare costs
- The impact of inflation
Your personalized benchmark is developed by taking your unique goals, resources, and circumstances into account and providing a truly relevant benchmark for gauging the performance of your portfolio. By using the Family Benchmark process, the end result is often the ability to take less risk with your investment choices, while still having confidence in your financial independence.
Focusing on What Matters Most
Think about how the ups and downs of the financial markets affect your mood and stress level. Would a sudden drop of 10% or more in the S&P 500 or Dow Jones Industrial Average keep you up at night? Do you have a good understanding of how market volatility impacts your financial future and your ability to pursue your goals?
Following day-to-day market movements is not only time-consuming, but can cause unnecessary stress and anxiety. More importantly, it can result in making poor financial decisions when emotions get in the way of reason.
Your Family Benchmark empowers you to focus on the only number that matters most to you and your family. This number not only helps you to remain on track toward your individual goals and objectives, but helps you manage the anxiety associated with trying to track and interpret short-term market fluctuations.
Find Your Family Benchmark
To learn more about your personal Family Benchmark, visit www.cornerstonewealthgroup.com/survey/ to take our twelve question survey to discover the right investment strategy for you. To learn more about how our Way2Wealth strategies may help you pursue true wealth, please call our office at (301) 739-8505 or email me at [email protected]. No strategy assures success or protects against loss. Investing involves risk including loss of principal.
About Scott
Scott Ford, founder and CEO of Cornerstone Wealth Management Group and a Carson Institutional partner, serves on the investment committee as the technical strategist. He is a registered principal at LPL Financial and is a registered financial consultant. Scott is ranked in the top two percent of all LPL registered financial advisors based on annual production.
He was recognized as one of the 20 Rising Stars of Wealth Management in 2008 by Private Asset Management Magazine. Scott is the author of three books: The New York Times Bestseller, The Sustainable Edge, as well as Financial Jiu-Jitsu: A Fighter’s Guide to Conquering Your Finances and The Widow’s Wealth Map: Six Steps to Beginning Again. Scott and his family reside in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Securities offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment advisory services offered through CWM, LLC, a Registered Investment Advisor. LPL Financial is under separate ownership from any other named entity.