We are committed to keeping you informed about your plan, and recent weeks have seen considerable volatility in global financial markets. This may continue for some time, as there continues to be broad uncertainty about the impact of COVID-19.
The Vanguard Target Retirement Funds that form the core of our plan’s investment programs are invested across a broad, highly diversified range of equity and bond markets. As such, their value will continue to reflect some of the volatility in international markets. You may experience more pronounced ups and downs than usual in the value of your plan account over the coming period.
While no one can predict what will happen with financial markets in the coming weeks and months, research shows that attempts by individual investors to time the market tend, on average, to lead to worse outcomes for those investors. This is because investors tend to get out of the market when stocks are low and get back into the market when stocks are high, leading them to do worse than they would have done had they kept investing through market ups and downs.
Investing for retirement is a marathon, not a sprint. What matters is consistency over the long term, staying the course through market ups and downs.
That is how we designed your plan — to help you achieve better retirement value-for-money through long-term, consistent saving and investment behaviours. That is why we encourage regular, automatic monthly contributions, use highly diversified target-date funds that automatically become more conservative as you age, and focus the entire program on building a stream of monthly retirement income.
If you would like to discuss your plan with someone, we invite you to email us at info@omainsurance.com.
Thank you for joining our plan, and we look forward to continuing to serve you in building a more secure retirement.