The concept of long term contributions was devised by Wray and Thompson (1990) to describe the accumulation of inbreeding in a population under selection, and further developed by Woolliams and Thompson (1994) to describe genetic progress. This study describes a method to utilise these relationships for optimising schemes where the breeding objective is cumulative net response with restrictions on inbreeding. The selection decisions at a given generation can be obtained from maximising the function f(x) of accumulated gain corrected for squared contributions: f(x) = xTg-λTAx, where x is the vector of long term contributions, g is the vector of estimated breeding values, A is the matrix of genetic relationships which has not been corrected for reduced Mendelian variance with inbreeding (unlike the method of Wray and Goddard, 1994), and λ is a constant taking positive values.