Create your own wealth creation plan

This course will provide you with a detailed overview of the key things you need to know to make smart financial choices that are right for you. As well as discovering what you need to know you’ll also learn how to take action straight away.

As a result of completing the activities during this course you will:

1. Create a wealth creation plan to achieve your lifestyle goals
2. Identify how to plug any gaps in your financial foundations
3. Understand mainstream investment, superannuation and insurance structures
4. Understand the appropriate next steps you need to take in wisely managing your money

It will be hands on with activities for you to complete each week as you construct your personal financial plan.

I am presenting this seven week course  as part of the regular Adult Community Education courses offered by the Challenger Institute of Technology (formerly called Challenger TAFE). It will be held at their Heathcote campus in Applecross, Perth.

Learn more about the course and how to enrol here.

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Tax cuts in terms everyone can understand

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

• The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
• The fifth would pay $1.
• The sixth would pay $3.
• The seventh $7.
• The eighth $12.
• The ninth $18.
• The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve.

“Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20.”

So, now dinner for the ten only cost $80. The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes.

So, the first four men were unaffected. They would still eat for free. But what about the other six, the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ’fair share’?

The six men realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being ‘PAID’ to eat their meal.

So, the restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

• The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
• The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% savings).
• The seventh now paid $5 instead of $7 (28% savings).
• The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
• The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
• The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to eat for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

“I only got a dollar out of the $20,” declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man “but he got $10!”

“Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than me!”

“That’s true!!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works.

The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table anymore.

This parable is often circulated whenever tax cuts are being discussed and especially when the direction of those tax cuts is being politicised (that’s always isn’t it?).

You can get a sense of the value system of the original author through the parable. But I am interested to hear your view and reactions to the above –  please share them in the comments below (you can do so using “Anon” as your name if you wish.)

If the Henry Tax Review in Australia results in cuts in personal tax rates how should they be applied?

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If so, then this e-book is brimming with ideas to help you kick start the new decade.

My article, “How To Have Enough Money For What You Want” is on page 17.

Most things in life require money to support them. My article shares a process to help you have enough money for those things in life that are most important to you. So if you are reviewing 2009 and setting new goals for 2010 my article is on the money about the money to support you achieving those goals.

You can browse the entire book below or download a copy to your computer.

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Almost all respondants said that they think about these things daily or a few times a week. That is a lot of time and energy consumed on money matters instead of spent doing the things you really love. Better to resolve the issues and spend more time with family and friends, or pursuing your hobbies.

Most issues fell into these three broad categories: Planning, Saving and Investing. For example:

“How will I have enough money for…”

“How can I save more money for…”

“Where is the right place to invest my savings?”

For an insight into the process to resolve these issues watch the recording of the webinar below.

The recording is 45 minutes. A small time investment when you consider the time cost of repetitively thinking about financial issues without resolution.

For assistance to make more clear, confident financial decisions call me.

Download video as an MP4 file (126MB)

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You give up flexibility for certainty plus you often pay more.

 The initial attraction to fix rates is often primal – we hate to miss an opportunity to save money. With more rate rises forecast that’s precisely what people think they’ll be doing if they fix rates.

Most get it wrong

The reality is somewhat different for most. Research has shown that over half of people who fix their rates end up worse off financially. They pay more interest and repayments than if they’d left their loans variable.

For a personal illustration of that just ask anyone who fixed their rates two years ago when there was still talk of rates going higher. That crystal ball was clearly broken.

The Rate You’ll Be Paying

One belief is that you can fix your rate at the current variable rate, so as soon as rates go up you’re in front. That is not the case. Fixed rates are set taking into consideration the lender’s forecast of rates during the fixed period.

The following table summarises rates as at 7th November 2009 from the four biggest lenders:

Source: Cannex

Ponder This: If you fix your rates now how high do variable rates need to go before you break even overall?

For and Against

Why Fix

• You can’t keep food on the table if your repayments go much higher
• Your mindset is that certainty is a very high priority. (Any control freaks reading this article?)

Downside Trade-offs:

• You immediately pay a higher interest rate and higher repayments, which impacts your cash flow
• You are very restricted on the amount of additional repayments you can make, meaning you can’t ahead as quickly as you may like.
• There can be a break fee if you need to refinance during the fixed term (usually when your fixed rate is higher than the variable rate, like now.)

Things To Consider

What are your life plans over the next three or five years?

Your financial decisions today impact on the options you will have available to you tomorrow, next year and five years from now. If you’re not well informed some decisions you make can shut out important life choices you would like to make in coming years.

For example, let’s say you plan to upgrade your home in the next few years. If you have a fixed rate you may be liable for a large break cost. At the time the cost may be so high that you can’t afford it and end up not being able to move as desired.

Maybe you don’t plan to for certain, but maybe it’s an above fifty percent possibility. If so, wouldn’t you like to keep the option flexibly open to you?

Before fixing your rates write down all the things you think you may like to do in the coming years. Project out as far ahead as the period for which you are planning to fix your rates.

Pay rises

Right now you may not have the cash flow to make high additional repayments but keep in mind the pay rises and bonuses you may receive over the next two to three years. Wouldn’t you love to be able to use them to nail your mortgage?

Cash flow control

Remember that if your cash flow is hyper-sensitive to increased repayments then fixing rates will immediately increase your pressure. Instead, over the next few months redirect that same amount into getting some cash flow coaching. You’ll discover ways to save money that’ll actually decrease your sensitivity to rate rises.

Call or e-mail me now to enquire about my Cash Flow Coaching program.

Still Unsure?

On thing you can do is hedge your bets by splitting your loan into a variable and a fixed portion. It doesn’t need to be an even split.

If you’d like some assistance in making the decision then book a meeting with me. I’m confident you’ll have a clear decision in under an hour.

Please Share This

If you found this article to be useful please forward it to your friends who have mortgages.

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Your current financial situation is the cumulative effect of all the financial and lifestyle choices you have made to date. Over time your possible lifestyle outcomes diverge greatly and not necessarily towards the outcome you most want (represented by the star on the diagram to the right).

The purpose of comprehensively planning your financial situation is to maximise the probability that you will meet or exceed your desired lifestyle.

Implicit in this is to minimise the impact of negative outcomes from your choices and from external events.

Why we don’t meet our financial goals

I believe there are three main categories of reasons we don’t meet our financial (and therefore lifestyle) goals:

• Knowledge – we don’t find out the right things for us to do right now
• Behaviour – we don’t do the things we already know we should be doing
• Time – we take action too late (delay)

In this article let’s look at three financial behaviours that can prove fatal to the achievement of your goals and what you can do to overcome them.

There are other destructive behaviours. I have chosen these three because they eat away at your foundation and are counter-productive to your other efforts. Long term readers may notice they link to the three Cs of Money Mastery.

The Three Fatal Behaviours

1. No idea what you spend

The common impact of this behaviour is that you end up spending way too much money on insignificant things and don’t have enough for really important things. The longer term impact is that you will not be diverting enough savings to longer term wealth creation meaning you may never be able to retire on your terms.

A symptom of this behaviour is thinking “wow, where did all my money go?” Another symptom is having an ad-hoc important event creep up on you, like a wedding or milestone birthday and you not being able to afford to fully participate. A variant of that symptom is that whenever that happens you whack it on your credit card and spend months trying to repay it.

What to do

You know what to do to solve this one just like I know what to do to get fitter. If you exhibit this behaviour hire a personal trainer for your money to support you in getting financially fit.

Call me about cash flow coaching and read my last article for additional suggestions.

2. Haphazard investment decisions

We make haphazard investment decisions when we don’t really know what is the best option for us but we can’t be bothered spending the time and energy on the research. So we tend to do what others are doing and take emotional comfort in being part of the crowd. (For most people this will be sub-conscious.)

The impacts of this behaviour are many and include:

• Mediocre returns – you may make money but probably nowhere near enough for the ‘risk’ you took, and also not as much as the rest of the market. So you miss your lifestyle target (the star).
• Stress – you are not confident about the investment so you are stressed about what could or is going wrong. You saved time doing the research but traded it for emotional stress – what’s the point?

What to do

The solution here includes:

• starting early (like right now) so time is on your side
• starting simple with only what you currently understand
• Taking incremental steps forward in your knowledge so you can increment forward in complexity of investments
• Hiring a mentor to educate you and thereby increase your confidence and capability. (A good financial planner will not only advise but also educate you.)

3. Blind optimism

This behaviour is all about the impact of negative outcomes from your choices and from external events.

Optimism – you think it’ll never happen to you. You underestimate both the likelihood and the consequences of something going askew.

Blind – You don’t even bother to investigate, consider and evaluate what could go wrong and its impact.

What to do

“Sometimes maybe curiosity can kill the cat-astrophe before it actually happens. Ask questions, seek answers, find possibilities.” Wise words from one of my mentors, Glenn Capelli.

Next erect your safety nets so if you fall off the tight rope of life you bounce rather than splat.

Do It

You probably know this stuff already – I write about it all the time. But if you are not doing the positive things you are robbing yourself of riches. One day the party is going to end and you will wake up with a rude hangover (that could last decades).

Party responsibly and you can enjoy both today and tomorrow.

Just like health, if you need support and accountability to implement new financial behaviours hire a personal trainer and even buddy up.

To have enough money to live the life you’d love stop researching new trends (K), start doing the foundation actions (B) and do it now (T).

Yours in prosperity

Matt Hern CFP
Financial Educator and Adviser

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The Newspoll found that two thirds of Australians are stressed about money, second only to being stressed about work. Does that include you?

The Lifeline poll reminded me of research published last year by Relationships Australia, which found that financial stress was the second largest contributor to relationship breakdown, affecting 35 percent of relationships.

This may be a stretch, but if we can work together to reduce our financial stress we may be able to lower the divorce rate and bring more joy into everyone’s lives.

Causes of financial stress

I started writing a list of what has caused financial stress among people I’ve met. Most of the causes fell into two broad categories:

1. Not enough money (to do, buy or retain)
2. Doing it for the money

In this article I’ll share some tips for reducing your stress caused by “not enough money”. Later, I’ll write about “doing it for the money”, but if you’re keen to learn how to earn money doing what you love then please call me now.

Stress about not enough money

Our stress seems to rise when we don’t have enough money for something that is really important to us. For example:

• To join our close friends on a big interstate or overseas holiday (maybe to celebrate a milestone birthday)
• To buy a bigger house when our family has well and truly outgrown the current shoebox
• To keep our car and house when we lose our job and fall behind in the mortgage repayments

Our stress doesn’t appear to rise when we decide we can’t afford the $2 chocolate bar or $15 movie ticket. I believe that is because those things aren’t really that important to most of us.

Financially related decisions can also stress us, and I believe they fall into this broad category. Our stress level is affected by the materiality of the loss or by the consequence of a wrong decision. If we get the decision wrong it may mean we won’t be able to upgrade our shoebox house when we want to, so then we stress about the decision.

Save for the Significant. Minimise the Insignificant

To reduce your financial stress plan to have enough money for those things that are most important to you. This is a personal thing and is based on your values.

Once you have plans to be able to afford the most important things in your life you can spend the rest of your money on whatever you want, guilt free.

You need to move your thinking from “next pay” to “next year” and then onto “next decade”.

I believe it is through spending too much on daily insignificant things that we end up not having enough for the significant things. This is often because the significant experiences and achievements are lumpy and irregular, so they can sneak up on us.

Bring far away important things into focus

Here’s an exercise that you can do.

Get a blank piece of paper and place it in landscape orientation. Across the middle from left to right draw a thick line. The left represents now; the right represents your passing, say at age 100.

Divide this line representing the remainder of your life into bite size chunks. The length of each chunk is not fixed, just make it meaningful to you. You may like symmetry and therefore make each chunk an even five years. Or each chunk could be of different length representing different life stages you have in mind.

Next fill the rest of the page with all of those achievements and experiences that are really important for you in each of those meaningful chunks of life. For example:

• Career transitions you’d like to make
• Places you’d like to see in the world
• Experiences you’d like to have with your family
• Time out of the workforce to study, reflect or travel
• Contributions you’d like to make to your community and world

For inspiration on what is really important reflect on your personal values.

Now implement plans

Implement a clear plan to manage your money so that you achieve and experience what is really important to you. Then you can happily spend the remainder on whatever insignificant pleasures you want, guilt free.

This is how you can achieve what I call financial fulfilment. And this exercise is part of the process that I call Fulfilment Financial Planning. To learn more call me on 1300 669 101. I take clients from all around Australia and would love to hear from you.

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Yes? You think we could?

Great, then join me now in making the declaration and spread the word to your friends, family and everyone you know. Blog it, tweet it and share links to those declarations in the comments below.

——- 

Legal note: This is not a recommendation to buy long, sell short or hug your co-workers. Just spread the positive vibe man.

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Time proved that to be correct and over the past nine years I have progressively read less and less of the mass media and more specialist publications. Most of what is published in the mass media makes me quesy or irate – often both simultaneously. Too frequently I feel that mass media financial articles confuse the issue and are too superficial by not considering the real, valid depth.

I could rant on this topic for a long time, but I won’t. Have some fun instead and watch this enlightening video by Jon Stewart of The Daily Showin the USA. Stewart takes the so called experts of CNBC, the business show, to task over their forecasts and soft approach on CEOs.

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3. About the Author

Or maybe have you been holding out on your regular investment plan because you haven’t felt comfortable?

If you made that decision based on an emotional trigger such as “feeling tired of losing money” then you face the real predicament of getting back in too late and missing out on big gains which often come in the early days of an economic recovery.

Watch the video below for some insights into how to decide when to start investing again.

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