How Much to Save for Your Financial Goals

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing , Motley Fool personal finance expert Robert Brokamp and Motley Fool employee Stephanie Marini discuss the following topics:

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Robert Brokamp: 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’s personal finance edition of The Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing podcast. I'm Robert Brokamp. This week, I'm joined by my Foolish colleague, Stephanie Marini, 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, former managing director at BlackRock . According to Ang, if you owned a total U.S. 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 8.5% 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 weren’t 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 a real estate investment trust. Even if you don’t invest in funds, your after-tax returns could be significantly curtailed by active trading and/or holding higher-yielding investments in your taxable brokerage account. The takeaway here is to give some thought to asset location, which is the science and art of deciding which investment should go in which accounts. Keep your most tax-inefficient investments in your IRAs and 401(k)s and use your brokerage account for investments that pay little to no dividends and that you plan to hold onto for many years, perhaps even decades.