Financial advice and you
Every comprehensive financial strategy has three key components:
- growing your wealth
- protecting it
- enjoying it.
Helping you to achieve your goals in each of these three areas depends primarily on your life stage and what you value. Discover how we can help you – and other generations of your family – get more out of life at each and every stage.
You have your whole life ahead of you and the world at your feet. Anything seems possible and you feel immortal. This is the time to dream big and live large. When you are starting out in life you want to set your sights high and give it a red hot go.
Now is a great time to set yourself some financial goals and start implementing a strategy to help get you there. Boring? Maybe. Effective? Definitely.
Growing your wealth
We can help you with:
- Negotiating employment terms / pay rise terms
- Repaying any education loans – so you can accelerate your wealth
- Choosing a super fund (your employer’s default fund is not necessarily your best choice)
- Selecting the right investment options within your super fund
- Saving for a home deposit
- Your first investments outside of super
- Forming good financial habits that will last a lifetime
- Structuring your cards and savings accounts to make it easy to manage your budget and avoid debt traps
- Long term goal setting; now is the best time to do it. We can help you identify clear, achievable goals and formulate a comprehensive strategy to achieve them.
Protecting it
We can help you with:
- Income protection insurance (so you’re not a burden on your parents if you’re unable to work for a while). Getting it right is actually a lot more complicated than most people think
- Optimising life insurance you get with your super – e.g. making sure you’re not over-insured
- Health, travel and car insurance.
Enjoy it
We can help you with:
- Your first nice car – the best way to finance it – buy, lease, hire-purchase, vendor finance or personal loan?
- Your big trip overseas or around Australia – the best way to pay for it?
- Renting your own place – establishing a credit rating, negotiating lease terms.
You’re ready now to start setting yourself up for the rest of your life. It might involve getting married and starting a family, a promotion, further education, starting your own business, or all of the above. That sense of immortality you had when you were younger may be starting to wear off, but you still feel that there’s plenty of time to make up for any risks you take that don’t pay off.
It’s a wonderful stage of life – when you have all the energy and optimism of youth, a good dose of the kind of wisdom that comes only with experience, and time on your side.
Growing your wealth
We can help you with:
- Negotiating employment terms / pay rise terms / exit terms
- Starting your own business – establishing tax-efficient structures to maximize your net income and facilitate cash flow – e.g. family trusts, partnerships and corporations
- Optimising your super to suit your life stage – getting the balance right between saving for your retirement and providing for the here and now; ensuring you select the investment options that suit your risk profile and your long term goals
- Self managed super funds. We can help you evaluate whether this is the right option for you; if the answer is yes, we can set it up for you and take care of all the management and administration
- Structuring and building your investment portfolio outside of super
- Structuring your cards and savings accounts to make it easy to manage your budget and avoid debt traps
- Formulating and implementing a robust financial strategy to speed you on your way to achieving your goals – before things start to get too hectic.
Protecting it
We can help you with:
- Life risk management – getting a comprehensive tailored risk strategy in place while you’re still young and healthy is a key priority
- We also have specialist expertise in business insurance and business succession planning.
Enjoying it
Travel, holidays, sports, leisure activities and pursuing your passions all come at a cost. We do more than just advise you on how to accumulate the wealth to pay for these things; we also do a lot of the leg work that comes with managing your wealth – which gives you more time and bandwidth to pursue the things you really enjoy.
Once you’ve started a family, life tends to develop a momentum if its own. You have no time to spare, growing responsibilities and lots of expenses. It can be extremely fulfilling, satisfying, joyful, worrying and stressful – all at the same time. That’s why it pays to have a solid financial strategy in place and also a team of professionals to lighten the load for you and help keep you on track, while you’re flat out with everything else.
Growing your wealth
We can help you with:
- Managing your own business – establishing tax-efficient structures, family trusts, partnerships and corporations
- Optimising your super to suit your life – getting the balance right between saving for your retirement and providing for the here and now; selecting investment options that suit your risk profile and your long term goals
- Self-managed super funds. We can help you evaluate whether this is for you, if the answer is yes, we can set it up for you and take care of the management and administration
- Reviewing any investment portfolios you hold outside of super
- Structuring and building your investment portfolio outside of super
- Reviewing your budget, debt management strategies and restructuring your cash flow to meet your needs if you have a growing family
- Funding education for your kids or maybe further education for yourself
- New horizons – coping financially with divorce and re-marriage
- Inheritance – how best to deal with the money and also the family issues that sometimes accompany it, it is never too early to get this in place.
Protecting it
We can help you with:
- Life risk management – ensuring those who depend on you are properly protected with a comprehensive, tailored risk strategy
- Not all insurers have a track record for paying claims and paying them promptly. We can direct you to the ones who do
- We also have specialist expertise in business insurance and business succession planning.
Enjoying it
Children, travel, holidays, sports, education, renovating and furnishing your home. We do more than just advise you on how to accumulate the wealth to pay for these things; we also do a lot of the leg work that comes with managing your wealth – which gives you more time and bandwidth to pursue the things you and your family really enjoy.
It wasn't that long ago that retirement seemed a lifetime away. Something you could worry about later. Now it's well and truly on the horizon – and the time you have left to gear up for a long and comfortable retirement is rapidly diminishing. It’s also when health issues start to surface that could curtail your ability to increase your income.
In short, it's crunch time.
So let’s crunch some numbers… Some of our clients find that at this stage of their lives the kids are through school and becoming less dependent on their parents so often that means there's less financial pressure. And you may have a partner who chooses to return to work full time which means you can give those retirement savings a welcome boost.
Here are some of the things you’re likely to confront at this stage of life. We can play a valuable role in helping you with all of these and more:
- Optimising your super to suit your life stage – your risk profile may change at this point in your life so you need a professional to help you make necessary adjustments
- Boosting your investment portfolio which you may be looking forward to using to supplement your retirement
- Funding further education or supporting you through an exciting career change
- Guiding you through a redundancy
- Helping you and your family with estate planning so a solid plan is in place.
As much as you might love your work (or not!), you know there’s a lot more to life. It’s time now to reap the rewards, get out there and do the things you never had enough time for before – while you still can. With people living so much longer now, making your nest egg last the distance is another key priority.
Here are some of the things you’re likely to confront at this stage of life. We can play a valuable role in helping you with all of these and more:
- How best to deal with your super – pensions, income streams
- Ensuring your investment options continue to match your risk profile and appetite
- Downsizing, sea change and tree change options
- Transitioning to retirement
- Preparing for the next phase – retirement living and aged care options
- Helping the kids – weddings, home deposits, bail-outs, caring for grandchildren
- Loss of a partner – taking over the financial reins, adjusting to life as a single
- Serious illness or other health issues
- Arranging aged care for your parents
- Inheritance and sibling issues that can come with that
- Maximising any entitlements to the age pension and other benefits including the Health Care Card, Commonwealth Seniors Health Care Card, Pensioner Concession Card and the Pharmaceutical Allowance. Eligibility criteria apply to each benefit. These criteria can be quite complex and can change over time
- Estate planning – Wills, powers of attorney and guardianship
- Extended holidays – we can take care of your finances for you while you’re away, so you can enjoy every minute. You deserve it.
We’re living much longer these days, but it’s increasingly common for the body to outlive the mind, which presents a whole range of issues for ourselves and those we love. We want to live out the final chapters of our lives in as much comfort and with as much dignity as possible – and without being too much of a burden to our children and grandchildren. We also tend to think more about what we might leave behind us, for the generations to follow.
We can play a valuable role in helping through this stage of your life:
- Aged care – evaluating and implementing options
- Maximising Centrlelink and other government benefits
- Dealing with exponentially increasing medical expenses
- Making your nest egg last the distance
- Passing it on to those you love
- Philanthropy – leaving a legacy
- Estate planning – Wills, powers of attorney and guardianship arrangements.