How Much to Save for Your Financial Goals
6/6/202626 min
It’s Month 6 of our 2026 Financial Planning Challenge! In this installment, Fools Robert Brokamp and Stephanie Marini suggest ways to prioritize and quantify your financial goals, and highlight some tools that will help you crunch the numbers. Also in this episode:-A recent study finds that taxes can take more than a third of your investment over the long term-According to a Wall Street Journal analysis, the five largest home insurers didn’t pay out on more than 44% of claims last year, up from 36% a decade earlier-The share of national income attributable to corporate profits is at an all-time high-Visit Fool.com/calculators, Dinkytown.net, or Calculator.net to find tools that can quantify and solve just about any financial conundrum Host: Robert Brokamp, CFP®, EAGuest: Stephanie Marini, CFP®, CRPC®Engineer: Bart Shannon Disclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement.We’re committed to transparency: All personal opinions in advertisements from Fools are their own. The product advertised in this episode was loaned to TMF and was returned after a test period or the product advertised in this episode was purchased by TMF. Advertiser has paid for the sponsorship of this episode.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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First 90 secondsRobert Brokamp· Host0:00
[upbeat music] How to calculate the amount you need to save for your financial goals and how much taxes are taking from your investments. That and more on this Saturday personal finance edition of The Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing Podcast. [upbeat music] I'm Robert Brokamp. This week, I'm joined by my Foolish colleague, Stephanie Morini, as we suggest ways to prioritize and quantify your goals, and highlight some tools that will help crunch the numbers for you. But first, some headlines from the past week or so, starting with an article from The Wall Street Journal's Jason Zweig, who wrote about a recent study from Andrew Ang, a former managing director at BlackRock. According to Ang, if you owned a total US stock market index fund for the 30 years ending in 2025, you earned 9.9% a year before taxes. Not bad. But if you own that fund in a taxable brokerage account, you earn just 8.25% annually after taxes, mostly due to owing taxes on the dividends and the fund's capital gains distributions. Now, that may not sound like a big difference, but if you invested $100,000 and earned 9.9% annually for 30 years, you'd have almost $1.7 million. But if you instead earned 8.25%, you'd have less than $1.1 million. In other words, you lost more than a third of your total return to taxes. This is from a total market index fund. It would have been worse if it were in a high-turnover actively managed fund or an index fund that invested in an asset class that had a higher yield, such as a fund that invests in value stocks or real