Automating Your Investment Strategy for Accelerated Financial Growth

When you cross the first huddle of deciding whether or not it is benefit to you to begin investing (and you've chosen that it's an important goal to pursue), your next effort should be focused on how to make impact through that effort. You want to really derive mileage, isn't it? Well, people easily fall in and out of doing even a good thing and that could easily become the pattern of your investment process. Allowing an inconsistent pattern of investment obviously limits the results you achieve and the potential for full financial transformation. That is the strong reason you have to seek ways to build consistency into your investment process. That means getting invested, staying invested and regularly loading up additional investments. When you really want to get big with your investments in the long term, there is, perhaps, no better approach. How does consistency help you? Consider these:

• You Build Your Investment Portfolio More speedily
  Building up quickly has a lot of benefits, best of which is that it allows time to act more effectively on your investment, bringing its compounding power into play, to multiply your investment. Time is an ally to your investments.
• You Gain Focus
  Because you don't take a casual in-and-out approach, you stay more focused, track the market more consistently and ultimately achieve better results.
• You Minimise Indecision and Emotional Hiccups
  Having a firm approach eliminates the vacillation and emotional doubts that can confuse and mar your effort. Do I or do I not? If you have chosen to keep investing consistently and have possibly set the level of investing, you eliminate the decision challenges that can freeze you from acting.
• More Hassle-Free Investing
  You spread the process more effectively, minimising the burden. That helps you achieve better success than imagining that there will be a time to be awash with money to invest, which may not come. A slow-and-steady-wins-the-race approach will pay better dividend because it simply ensures that you don't fail.
• You Take Advantage of Emerging Opportunities
  That's correct, since your programming of regular investment first guarantees that you have a provision regularly and that you are actively in the market. Otherwise, you may not be ready when great opportunities arise or even be aware, since your radar may be off the market at that point.

Build Consistency With Automation
Investing consistently sure has great benefits to it. So, it's worth some effort. One way to facilitate that objective is by automating the process. Automation here means setting up a system that just runs, with minimal discretionary interference. In other words, you don't want to keep deciding whether to invest, how much, at what intervals, etc. You can put all that on auto-run, in the sense that you just set up your system to work on a 'done-deal' basis. If, for instance, you choose an amount to invest at monthly intervals, you set up how it runs and that gets done on a regular basis. Here are some ideas to help you implement an automated investment process:

• Evaluate and decide. This is for you and your own good, so choose what base amount you can afford to invest on a consistent basis and at what intervals. Also decide what securities or assets you want to invest in (stocks, bank deposit, treasury bills or whatever) and in what proportion.
• Make your investment a first-charge on your income by any means that works with your pattern of earnings. If in paid employment with monthly salaries, for instance, a bank standing order will help: let your banker remit a set sum, on a standing basis, to your fund manager, stock broker or whoever invests for you. That gets timed to when your pay comes into the account. For a business person, tie transfers to your cash flow pattern. Increasing your contribution to a fund like the pension fund, which for employees is deducted at source by the employer, is another good mechanism. Where you can't fit into any of these, a standing arrangement for your investment funding cheque to be picked at agreed intervals by your investment company will also help. The idea is to employ arrangements that prevent your access to that portion of your earnings.
• Try to commit any windfalls that come to you to your investment funding. Since such inflows may not be easily timed, a prior arrangement about remittance may not work. But you should have the resolve to apply such receipts quickly to your financial growth project. It's so easy to dip into it, if you delay. A wise approach is to conclude your arrangement before actual receipt, if this is known in advance, and to act quickly on receipt.

Winning is By Design
Learning to take steps to compel regular, consistent investing will, in no time, help you build financial strength. While it could initially be challenging and downright inconveniencing, these are the kind of steps that get you where you want to be, which wishing will not achieve. Besides, you only implement a pattern like this for just a while to get used to it. So, consider implementing a process, as you begin the journey through another year, that can see you much financially stronger by the time the year is counted off 12 months hence. If you leave it to chance, you severely limit the prospect of success. Good luck!

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