by Tyson Ray | CFP®, CEPA®, CIMA® Founding Partner, CEO, Senior Wealth Advisor
There will always be something competing for your attention. Market swings. Interest rates. Inflation. Elections. Geopolitical conflicts. Oil prices. Economic predictions. And as we head into another election season, the volume can feel even louder. Paying attention to what’s happening in the world is important. But from an investment perspective, every new headline doesn’t need to change how you feel about your financial future.
Your wealth should help support the life you want to live. Maybe that means traveling somewhere you’ve always wanted to go. Maybe it’s spending a weekend with your grandchildren, getting outside, seeing old friends, or simply putting the phone away for a while.
Those experiences aren’t distractions from your financial plan. They’re often the reason you created one in the first place. At FORM, that’s why we spend so much time understanding what you want your resources to make possible. Not just someday, but along the way.
Financial planning for market volatility starts with your timeline
Both the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and Investor.gov offer a helpful way to think about market volatility: Your timeline matters. Money you’ll need relatively soon may need to be treated differently from money intended to remain invested for many years. When your goals are further away, you generally have more time to ride out the market’s ups and downs.
That principle is also a reason why we build your wealth plan around your actual life rather than predictions about what markets might do next.
When we know you’ll need money in the near future, we can plan for that need in advance. That might mean setting aside funds for a major purchase, travel, helping family, charitable giving, or another goal you know is coming. Doing so helps reduce the chance that you’ll need to sell investments at precisely the same time markets are experiencing significant volatility.
None of this means ignoring markets, politics, or the economy. Monitoring those conditions is part of our job. As advisors, we continue evaluating changing conditions, reviewing portfolios, and making adjustments when we believe they’re warranted. Good planning should also be resilient enough to recognize that uncertainty is part of investing.
I’ve also written about this philosophy in Market Volatility 2025: Why we’re staying calm and you should too, where I discussed how a tailored financial plan can help you prepare for the market’s inevitable ups and downs.
