Not what would you BUY

Often when I talk to clients about their retirement plans, one of the most obvious questions is “When would you like to retire?” They’ll often laugh and say something along the lines of “as soon as possible”. The interesting thing is that when I push them a little on this, most quickly backtrack! Faced with the prospect of actually being able to retire at 50 or 45 or even earlier, most of us balk at the idea.

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Why is that? It’s because we don’t know what we would do with our time. If we don’t know what we would do with our time, to me that means we don’t really know what the end goal of our financial plan is. We don’t really know what our ideal life looks like and what we are working towards. …

3 simple questions you need to ask yourself before you invest a penny.

Investing for the first time can be daunting. There is a huge amount of information available online to educate yourself on finances and investments, but finding the stuff that applies to you can be a real needle in the haystack situation.

Before you even get to this point, you need to understand whether investing is right for you, and whether you are ready for it. You need to have an investment ready mindset.

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This is really important, because investing can be a real rollercoaster ride. We live in a time where crazy, unexpected events seem to be around every corner, and investments markets feel all these lumps and bumps we see in our daily lives. …

Give your portfolio the best chance for success by avoiding these errors

I’ve worked with financial planning clients and their investments for close to 15 years, across 2 countries. There have been many clients over this time who have been managing their portfolios themselves prior to coming to see me. Some of them have been doing a fairly good job. What’s been really interesting to me is that for those who aren’t doing so great, the mistakes they are making are often very similar.

One of the benefits of being a Financial Planner is being able to see hundreds of different portfolios in action over the years. I’ve seen how they perform during good times, and I’ve seen how they’ve performed during bad times. Whilst we can’t only look at history to make our future investment decisions, it can provide some valuable lessons if we are prepared to pay attention. …

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“The FTSE 100 was up 62 points today on the back of positive economic data”

If you’ve ever heard anything like this on the news, they’re referring to what’s known as a stock market index. As a Financial Planner, it’s important for me to understand how this benchmark relates to my client's investments, when to use it and when to ignore it. When investing for yourself, it’s important that you understand this as well.

I’m going to cover what an index actually is, how they differ around the world, and why they’re important when it comes to your investments.

What is it?

An index is a basket of investments that have been selected to represent a particular stock exchange or market sector. There are thousands of indexes around the world based on a multitude of different assets in different countries. These range from huge stock indexes like the S&P 500 with a market capitalization (value) of over $30 Trillion to the world’s smallest index, the Trop X in Seychelles with only 24 stocks listed. …

It sucks

The pool was green again. This was the 3rd time the rental agent had been in touch to tell me that the pool in our investment property was full of algae. The pool guys would need to get out there and do a full treatment on it, again, to get it back to normal.

I asked them what was going on. We’d spent $3,000 replacing the filter 18 months ago, had a monthly pool service set up that we paid for and had forked out for a pool cover to limit how many leaves fell in. They had a word with the tenant, and apparently the answer to this question was that he had decided that the filter was too noisy so he doesn’t run it. …

The ups and downs of running your own business

Dinner was ready. I could hear the pots and plates banging in the kitchen. My son’s inpatient babbling carried down the hallway, and I felt that familiar wave of guilt begin to push up from deep in my stomach. I knew I should go and join the family, but I also knew that if I just got this report done I’d be able to send the invoice off to the client. Not that urgency on my end seemed to matter, they wouldn’t get around to paying me for weeks.

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I’d started my own business to be able to have more freedom and flexibility to manage my own time. We had a new baby and I wanted to be able to help out when I could and be more available at short notice. The companies I’d worked for in the past had very strict, old school ideas about working hours and time in the office. It didn’t seem to matter whether I was working a solid 8 hours or surfing the web and chatting the colleagues all day. As long as I’d put on a suit and tie and suffered through my hour long commute each way, they were happy. But I wasn’t. …

Personal finance at it’s most extreme

For every subculture, hobby, career, or concept, there are people out in the world who are prepared to take it to the extreme.

There are people who like to ride their bike a bit on the weekends, and then there are those that are obsessed with the sport. They have 7 bikes, spend thousands on upgrades and new parts to save a couple of grams in weight. They’ve got a turbo trainer and Zwift and all they want to talk about is cycling.

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There are people who like to play video games now and then, and there are many people out there who play games almost every waking minute. When they aren’t paying they’re watching streams of other gamers, writing on gaming forums or watching gaming videos. …

Practical steps to improve your financial future

I was already starting to regret this. The sun was shining, and it was the perfect balance between being warm, but not hot enough to be uncomfortable. There was a light breeze brushing across my face and I was standing in beautiful, lush green surroundings. Off in the distance was a large lake. A water fountain in the center sprayed high into the sky and ducks bobbed along the surface.

I was not having a good time.

My playing partner was a good friend who had been playing golf since he was a little kid. His first clubs were a junior set and by the time he was a teenager he’d had thousands of hours of practice. He’d convinced me to come along for a round with him. I’d never played before, but I figured I was young, fit, and played a lot of sports. …