Your annual review: a 20-minute checklist

Once a year is the right cadence

Checking your investments every day is a habit that costs you calm and, often, money. Prices move constantly. Most of that movement is noise, and reacting to noise is how good long-term plans get broken.

A long-term portfolio doesn't need daily attention. It needs one honest look a year. That's enough to catch anything that genuinely matters and rare enough that you're never tempted to tinker. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar, pick a date you'll remember, and give it 20 quiet minutes.

Here's the reassuring part before you even start: for most people, most years, the honest answer to every question below is "keep going, change nothing". This checklist exists to confirm that, not to give you homework.

The 20-minute checklist

1. Are you still investing consistently? (3 minutes)

Open your account and look at the last twelve months. Did your monthly contributions actually go out every month, or did one quietly fail when a card expired or money got tight?

The check: confirm your standing order or direct debit is still running and still funding your investment. If you got a pay rise this year, this is the one moment worth a small change: nudge the amount up. If contributions lapsed, restart them. That's it.

2. Has your allocation drifted? (4 minutes)

Over a year, the things that grew fastest end up making up a bigger slice of your portfolio than you started with. That slow shift is called drift, and gently steering it back to your intended mix is called rebalancing.

The check: if you hold a single broad ETF like ISWD, there's essentially nothing to do here, the fund rebalances its own holdings for you. If you hold two or three funds in deliberate proportions, glance at whether they're roughly where you wanted them. Small drift is fine. Only act if something has wandered a long way from your plan.

3. Are you using this year's fresh ISA allowance? (3 minutes)

Every 6 April, a new UK tax year begins and your Stocks & Shares ISA allowance resets to £20,000. It doesn't roll over. Whatever you don't use by the following 5 April is gone for good.

The check: are this year's contributions landing inside your ISA rather than a taxable account? Almost no beginner gets close to the full £20,000, so the goal isn't to max it out. The goal is simply to make sure the money you are investing gets the tax-free wrapper it's entitled to.

4. Has anything changed in your goals or timeline? (3 minutes)

Your strategy should match how long your money has to grow. A pot you won't touch for twenty years can sit calmly through market dips. A pot you need in two years shouldn't be taking the same risks.

The check: has your life changed in a way that moves your timeline? A house deposit now on the horizon, a new baby, a career shift. If nothing has changed, your plan doesn't need to change either. If something has, that's your signal to think about whether your timeline still fits.

5. Calculate and set aside your zakat (4 minutes)

Zakat on your investments is an annual Islamic obligation, not an optional extra. Once your wealth has sat above the nisab for a full lunar year, a portion of it is due, and your ISA or trading account counts as part of that wealth.

The check: work out what you owe and set it aside now, while you're already looking at the numbers. Doing it once a year, on the same date, keeps it simple and stops it building up as a vague worry. Our zakat calculator does the working for you.

6. Confirm your ETF is still doing its job (3 minutes)

A good core holding does three things: stays broad, stays cheap, and stays screened. None of these usually change, but a yearly glance costs nothing.

The check: is your fund still widely diversified across many companies, still low-cost on fees, and still shariah screened? For a fund like ISWD the answer is almost always yes. You're just confirming nothing has quietly shifted underneath you.

If in doubt, do nothing

Notice how few of these checks ask you to actually change something. That's by design. Investing rewards patience, and the strongest thing you can usually do at your annual review is close the app and let compounding keep working.

Once your plan is running smoothly, the natural next question is what happens years from now when you start drawing money out. That's where we head next.