Your financial goals are related to your personal goals because financial goals are simply personal goals with a cost attached.
A goal is something you want that you are willing to commit to and sacrifice for; a wish is also something you want, but you are not willing to commit to or sacrifice for it.
An investment plan is a detailed description of all the major components of your investment strategy. It is important because it creates a framework for every investment activity in which you will participate. It states what you will invest in, how you will invest, why you will invest, what percentage of your money you will invest, and so on.
The four different categories of an investment plan are (1) risk and return objectives, (2) investment guidelines and constraints, (3) investment policy, and (4) portfolio monitoring, reevaluation, and rebalancing.
An investment benchmark is a hypothetical investment portfolio that shows how a specific set of assets performed over a specific period of time. These portfolios can help investors evaluate how their investments are performing versus how the benchmark is performing over the same time period. The consequence of not having a benchmark is that you cannot know how well or poorly your investments are doing.
