At iGPS, we think about personalization in the following way: landing on the moon. To land on the moon, you must be very precise and exact. Even one-one thousandth of a degree off from the beginning of your journey, even though it is so minute, it carries you across millions of miles, and you will end up somewhere you don’t recognize.
It’s certainly not going to be the moon. If the moon is your destination, you must be extremely accurate.
Similarly, investing for retirement today requires that same precision. Very often, Target Date Funds (TDFs) are not personalized. What do we mean by that? We are taught to save a lot of money, invest, and not worry about it. Let somebody else take care of it. Put it into default mode. Put it into a QDIA, Qualified Default Investment Alternative, and just leave it alone. This is good advice, but not great advice. We want you to save and invest. We don’t want you to look at it every day, watch the market go up and down and make hasty decisions. At iGPS, we want to get you to your destination. We want you to reach the moon.
Think about investing for retirement in terms of long-distance journey. It’s 20 years or more of investing, to have sufficient money to live another 20 to 40 years. If you are in your 20s or 30s, we are talking about 40-60 years for the entire journey. That’s a very long time. If you’re not on-course from the beginning and consistent, you’re going to veer off somewhere you don’t recognize. You will most likely not have enough assets to support you in retirement.
At iGPS, we take your information and personalize the investment to you. Repeating that over time as your information changes will make you more likely to reach your destination.
Personalization is an item you want to look carefully at and adopt. It will get you to your destination more accurately than the way it is done today with traditional TDFs.