1- SAVING FOR YOUR HOUSE

When you get married, owning your own house is probably one of your big financial goals. This is really a desire for newly-wed couples all over the world, and few are lucky to inherit or receive a house as a wedding gift from their parents. However, the good news for couples with middle income and without support from their family, purchasing a house is still possible.

To buy the right house for you, you’ll spend a lot of time comparing various neighborhoods, checking the accessibility and prices of houses in the areas you’d like to live, and finally checking the houses very thoroughly to see their conditions, location, nearby surroundings and the area planning.

However, the most important thing you cannot overlook is preparing a financial plan to buy the house.

2- INVESTING FOR YOUR CHILD’S FUTURE

Even if you  own your dream house, you’ll always be anxious that your beloved children receive the best education possible to ensure they also have a bright future. In modern society, more and more parents are interested in sending their children to study in advanced educational environments, often now abroad. These indeed often bring greater opportunities to the children. As society and the global economy has developed, it is easy to acknowledge that intellectual strength today is rewarded more than unskilled, manual strength. This is true for any industry, regardless of whether it’s health care, finance, mechanics or agriculture and the forestry industry.

Additionally, education will help your children to enjoy the value of life more fully: a well-educated person will be offered more job opportunities, more options for their own future to make them satisfied with their career. People with good educational background also have many opportunities to visit new places, mingle with people in new communities and enjoy new fun.

From those perspectives, more and more parents want to send their children to the best educational institutions, an environment which is better than what they had experienced in the past. However, the biggest barrier to this aspiration is often financial capacity. Therefore, a recommendation is that you should create a detailed financial plan in the long term right now for your children’s education, including timelines and targeted savings amounts. Starting early with your plan will normally mean some sacrifices and economy now. But you will have the satisfaction as your savings amount grows with your child, and often finding that with gradually increasing income that the burden gets lighter as you go along. Start too late and the burden is much more daunting.

3- ENJOY YOUR RETIREMENT

Once you have achieved stability at work and in life, you feel more secure with your grown-up children with their bright future. Now, the comforts of life are what you are thinking of.

Therefore, you will have another financial goal which is to prepare for your life in old age. When reaching retirement age, we often think about a life released from daily work. However, not everyone has the foresight to prepare a good financial plan for a comfortable life after retirement.

A typical example for a comfortable retirement life is that we can see many tours designed for the elderly are very popular these days, or more specifically, you can easily see images of Western elderly couples or groups of foreign elderly tourists visiting other countries.

Retirement life accounts to a fourth of our lives. Thus, to ensure a stable financial source and a comfortable retirement, preparing a plan by saving during your working life cash and earning interest from them at the same time when you are young is essential.

4- REALISING YOUR FINANCIAL GOALS

Financial goals may vary depending on the stage of life. Some short-term goals are buying motorcycles, cars, travelling or preparing for a wedding. There are also long term goals as previously mentioned. After planning your financial goals, how can you achieve them? The solution is to save and invest with a Systematic Investment Plan (SIP).

Saving and investing are necessary to achieve financial goals whether they are short term or long term. Therefore, choosing an effective investment tool is very important. In the past, traditional investment means such as bank deposits, buying gold or investing in real estate have been very popular. Today, the development of financial markets has created new investment channels. In particular, open-ended funds are a new investment channel in Vietnam. This is a financial tool that anyone with medium to long term financial goals can also participate.

VCBF’s open ended funds are suited for all people with long-term financial goals. They are not exclusive to people with high income, but are particularly valuable for all normal, middle income people. The minimum amount for the first investment is VND five million dong and at least VND one million dong for subsequent investments (if you like to increase your investment). Especially, for families to create a long term and effective investment plan, VCBF introduced Systematic Investment Plans (SIP), which is a regular way of saving around the world and adapted from the concept Franklin Templeton Investments successfully in many countries.

SIP is quite similar to savings because you will invest periodically (monthly or quarterly) with a fixed amount. You can participate in SIP with VND one million dong monthly or quarterly. This amount is used to buy fund units at the net asset value (NAV) of the fund units at the time of payment.

Savings and investment will help us to achieve financial goals in life. Plan today to get closer to your dreams.