Over the life of an investment, various factors will influence growth, but one vital ingredient will remain constant. 

What you put in matters, as do economic ups and downs, taxes or your investment manager and investment choices. 

All of those can have positive and negative effects on growth. But time is constant and constantly positive. 

Nothing contributes more consistently and predictably than time. 

Firstly time is a great adjuster. 

Over the short-term, an investment can be like looking at your smooth skin under a microscope. 

Its full of undulations and unpredictable, going up and down in response to every shock in the system.  

One counter can upset a good year, due to bad decisions or corruption or bad management by a firm's managers. 

But sometimes a sneeze from the US Fed or a few words out of place in some powerful place, causes things to wobble.

But at regular intervals, markets will adjust, largely because reality must correct for sentiment, in all markets. 

However, time is like zooming out, until our untidy skin looks perfectly smooth again. 

If I have a rattle in my car, turning up the stereo solves it quickly, but time reduces the noise in investment patterns. 

Yet, many forget about time's therapeutic ways and over-correct for bumps in the road, which rarely helps. 

Indeed, it often means investors exit when prices have fallen or re-enter when prices have peaked. Both are suicidal. 

Time also directly influences terminal values. 

To reach a given retirement goal at say 65, starting at 30 will logically require a shallower growth rate than starting at 35 or 40. 

So your starting contribution, assuming the same annual growth, will be as much as twice what starting at 30 would have been. 

But even if you adjust the age-35 starting contribution, for inflation, it will still cost you up to 50% more in real terms. 

Alternatively, to illustrate the flip side of adding 5 years, if an investment stays growing for 5 more years to age 70, it can double. 

But again, adjusting back for inflation and removing the 66 to 70 year contributions, would likely still leave you 30% better off. 

Time can erode the pain of an investment. 

When you are starting out, there is very little money to play with. So its hard to make a meaningful start to a long-term investment.

But, if you do, and adjust your lifestyle to live on say 10-15% less, over time that will become less and less material to you.

Eventually you'll barely notice the cost. Indeed, many investors tend to forget about it. Great (if it is still performing). 

As they say, time is the great healer. 

You know that any pain you feel now over any issue, will diminish with time. So will any anger or shame. 

Time is a wonderful fixer. It smooths out all the bumps on our life journey and it restores perspective. 

But it does so utterly predictably and it will work equally well for everyone, everywhere, for all occasions. 

So, there you have one reliable constant that doesn't have to just speak to erosion or ageing. It can be your best friend.   

(c) Peter Missing