Frances Cook

Whatever the gurus say, nobody knows ahead of time.

You've got to give it that time.

But they are still proven investments with known outcomes.

They're just going to bounce around at different levels on the way to making you money.

So if you're younger, you can dive into investing more forcefully because you have more time to ride out the waves.

Now,

The rule of 100 gives us a baseline to help us figure that out.

What is the rule of 100?

Take your age, subtract it from 100, and what's left is the percentage of your money that you, according to this rule, should put into riskier high growth investments like shares and property.

The rest should be in cash savings or less risky investments like bonds.

This works as a rule of thumb for the average person because it immediately demonstrates that younger people can afford to go harder in building up wealth, generating higher risk investments, but they still need some safe money because life happens.

No matter what, you're still having a certain amount in the safety bucket.

Meanwhile, older people need more cash on hand because they're in the spending phase of life.

Without mentioning the D word, older people don't have as much time to ride out a market downturn and then cash in on the upswing.

But they can still put a certain amount into riskier assets because, hey,

Nobody knows when death is coming.

You could have a few decades of retirement years, in which case you do want some money still working and growing on your behalf.

So for me, at 38 now, 62% of my money, according to this rule, goes into shares or other risky growth assets.

Now, when I was in my 20s, it would have been more.

But, of course, this is a general rule of thumb.