My Investment Strategy - Part 1

My aim is to make this blog a place to record my investment strategy. Perhaps others might find it useful. I work as a contractor in the Oil & Gas industry, and as such, therefore need to make my own provision for retirement. And I'm all in favour of this for the followingreasons:

1) The company I started working for after I graduated, and with which I stayed for 8 years before leaving to go contract, has this year declared that future contributions by employees on the final salary, defined benefits pension scheme will be under a defined contributions basis (previous contributions will still be under a defined benefits basis).

2) I also recently learnt that upon retirement, only a third of the defined benefits pension is index linked.

3) The performance of the funds invested in by the company pension are, in my opinion not the best selection possible.

So it is all good and well a company contributing towards your pension, but if it ceases to provide a defined benefits scheme, results in only a partially index linked pension on retirement and invests in anything but the best funds, then there is little incentive for someone to stay in that type of employment who wants to be proactive in handling their future retirement income.

My aim is to provide for my retirement in the following means:

1) Stockmarket investments.

2) Property.

3) Other.

In my following posts I will explain my plan for each of the above.