Investment horizon

Investment horizon.

Your investment horizon is the point in time when you hope to achieve a particular investment goal. That horizon, sometimes called your time frame, may be fixed or flexible, depending on the nature of the goal and the investment decisions you take.

For example, paying for college is often a fixed goal because most students enroll the year they graduate from high school. Retirement may be a more flexible goal if you have the choice about when you will stop working.

The landscape can be more complicated if you have more than one investment goal, and therefore there's more than one horizon in the picture.