1. Review the value of your investment portfolio.

Have your investments lost value? Gained value? By how much? Answering these questions will give you the big picture overview of your portfolio’s status.

2. Check how your portfolio is performing in comparison to benchmarks.

If you simply review the absolute performance of your investments, you may feel you’ve done very well or quite poorly. However, what really matters is how your investments have performed relative to their respective benchmark indexes. There are a number of indexes that can be used as benchmarks against which you can measure your investment’s performance.

3. Compare the individual investments in your portfolio against comparable investments in the same asset class.

Step 2 will give you an idea of how your particular investments performed against their relative indexes, while Step 3 will help you understand how individual investments similar to yours have performed. Compare your individual investments against comparable investments in the same asset class.

4. Ensure that your investments remain consistent with your established goals.

As your life circumstances change, so should your investments. If your financial goals include sending children to college or saving for retirement, you’ll want to transition your assets into more conservative investments as you get closer to your goal.

You’ll also want to evaluate whether your asset allocations remain consistent with your financial goals. As investments gain and lose value, your asset allocations can change. You may need to adjust your investments if uneven gains and losses have disrupted your asset allocations.

5. Make any necessary tweaks to your investment allocations.

Once you’ve gone through steps 1 through 4, you should know what changes are needed in your portfolio. To make those changes, you can:

• Sell off investments from overweighted asset categories and use the proceeds to purchase investments for underweighted asset categories.

• Purchase new investments for underweighted asset categories.

• Alter your contributions (if you make regular contributions to your investment portfolio) so that more investments go to underweighted asset categories until your portfolio is back in balance.