6.2.7 Annual Review Checklist

The questions genuinely worth asking each year

Are the specific goals set previously still genuinely relevant, or has something meaningful in your life circumstances changed since they were originally set? Has your actual asset allocation drifted meaningfully away from its intended target as different assets have naturally grown at different rates over the past year? Has any specific fund you hold changed its manager, or noticeably shifted its investment style, since your last review?

Are there any genuine tax-loss harvesting opportunities currently available worth considering before the financial year closes? Is your current contribution rate, the amount you are actually setting aside and investing each month, still appropriately matched to your goals given any changes to your income or expenses over the past year? And finally, has your emergency fund kept pace with your current cost of living, or has it quietly become undersized relative to your present, actual expenses?

Why a defined annual checklist genuinely helps

Without a structured, defined checklist like this to work through, an annual review can easily become a much vaguer, less thorough exercise, glancing only at overall portfolio value without systematically checking any of the specific underlying factors that actually determine whether a financial plan genuinely remains on track.

Turning the review into an actual action list

Each of these six questions should ideally produce a specific, concrete action item wherever the honest answer suggests something meaningfully needs adjusting, rather than the review simply ending in a vague, general sense that everything is probably fine without anything specific having actually been checked.