Month: July 2018

Everyone makes jokes about the kind of old age they want. Or dream of travelling, sleeping in, and general good times. The reality is mostly different, as people experience different life challenges, including health, and the fact that having no purpose tends to kill humans, so the everlasting holiday wears off after 6 months.

But we have all had dreams we have had to shelve in our life. Doing things we dreamed of when we were young – before jobs, kids and mortgages. What if the next phase of your life was your reinvention, where you got to live that dream?

Having a life plan and a clear vision of what you want your future to be like is the first step toward that. By asking yourself these five simple questions, you can begin the process of your reinvention – and have the years ahead to look forward to it.

1. What do you want to be different than today? (House, job, hobbies, time…)
2. What did you used to want to be?
3. What excites you that are currently not doing?
4. How much per month do you think it would take to do that?
5. What’s your timeframe – when could you start your reinvention?

Armed with these questions, you can then go about seeking financial advice around how this could be paid for. It’s also a brilliant idea to get a full health check – one of my dearest friends just paid for an MRI which showed she had cancer – which would not have been picked up if she did not do this test. Your health and likely challenges ahead is important to know about as much as you can.

Then you can do your rough timeline – do you target 2028 as your reinvent year? 2030? Whatever the goal, putting a date to it will make it real and give you long term goals to work toward.

Reinvention is the new retirement, and controlling your own future is a way of avoiding the negative new cycle and sometimes frightening world we live in today.

I am happy to be your guide on this reinvention – I am in the process of doing it myself, and have already begun to see the benefits.

Until next time,
Vanessa

Of the big five lessons that need to be unlearned about money, I think time perhaps is the biggest missed opportunity.

Why? Simply because the biggest trap of time is that you always think you have plenty of it – and because of this, tend to miss out on one of the biggest opportunities to grow wealth almost effortlessly – as it’s time that allows your money to make money for you in the world of investing.

In Australia our government had the incredible foresight to introduce superannuation – meaning those who start work are putting away 9.5% of their income into investments to support themselves in retirement.

It has been proven however, that 9.5% will not be enough to fund an adequate and dignified retirement – and for many will only cover about 30% of living expenses.

So why is time, which seems at face value, a pretty hard thing to master and to unlearn? I believe because it goes to the very heart of us being human – and our unwillingness to acknowledge our own fragility and ultimately mortality.

Sounds deep? It is. Too often we want to live in the moment (which is not always easy), enjoy ourselves now, and let tomorrow figure itself out.

I know I certainly did. I spent my 20’s acquiring the things I wanted, and chasing the experiences that defined my view of what a good time was. Quite frankly, I don’t regret it. What I do regret however, is that I did not have the foresight to tuck a little away and invest it along the way.

When I think of the all the clothes, shoes, cars and stuff I spent my money on, I wish I had that little birdy on my shoulder telling me to tuck 10% of it away. Not in a bank account, but in an investment account. To be honest, I don’t think I even knew what a managed fund or a stock was then, or how to access them.

It was the early days of the internet, and the wealth of information and easy access was not there. I did not have family who knew anything about it, and it certainly was not taught at school or university.

And so I missed one of the biggest easy wins in my life when it comes to money. And time passed, as it always does. Children arrived, and nature kicks in, wanting to give your kids everything you can. This becomes the focus financially, and again, time passes, and the opportunity to make my money work for me slipped further behind.

I guess my awakening to the unlearning of time came during my 40s. And perhaps that is when most of us finally start to understand that time moves quickly, and that we don’t have all the time in the world. It’s certainly been that way for me, and many of my friends.

This is why I have dedicated myself and my company to awakening and helping gen X Unlearn Money in time – to be able to prepare for the last third of their lives – and be able to live it exactly the way they want it.

But there is still time to change habits around money and start investing. It all begins with an awakening that we should be doing more – but what exactly?

While I explore that in much more detail in our fifth unlearning pillar – action – a quick guide to get you started should include:

1. Saving enough income to cover at least three months of living. The experts all say six months, but the reality is, that’s a hard task when many of us have massive monthly expenses. Three months gives you enough peace of mind that if the worst happens you can hustle and make other arrangements.
2. Checking your insurance, wills and estate planning. If time does run out early, will everyone you care about be okay? I believe the best way to do this is through a quality financial adviser. I pay my adviser a retainer of $200 a month. For that I get the best deal on insurance, wills and estate planning and the knowledge that if anything happens to me or my husband, he will be the first phone call to make.
3. Starting an investment account. There are so many ways you can do this now. I prefer managed funds to individual stock buying. You can buy them through mfunds on the ASX, go to the managers direct or access them through a financial adviser in a variety of ways. Having worked in the finance industry for more than 23 years, we have deep connections in the sector and suggest you spend a few months of 3-5 minutes a day getting across professional investing – not so you can do it yourself (unless you want to), but so you can understand it enough to have confidence that you are putting your money in the right place for you.

Of course, when money is tight this plan is not going to be done overnight. And that’s another thing about time we all need to unlearn – start now anyway, even if it’s seems impossible. Because whether it takes two years or 10 to get to the part where you start investing outside of super, the time will pass anyway.

For time stops for no man or woman.

Today the unlearn lesson I want to explore is focus. Or rather, clarity about your future and your goals. While it may seem odd that the abilities to create wealth and to focus are strongly related, it’s actually not too big a stretch to say, as if you don’t have a goal, you won’t hit it.

Today, the unlearn lesson I want to explore is focus. Or rather, clarity about your future and your goals. While it may seem odd that the abilities to create wealth and to focus are strongly related, it’s actually not too big a stretch to say, as if you don’t have a goal, you won’t hit it.

I have found over my life, my goals have changed. In my 20’s, I wanted to start a business, and travel to Europe. In my 30s, it was about having kids and figuring out how life works when you have little people.
I’m now in my 40’s and life is different again, but it is still driven by bigger goals, and a defined end game.

I have always believed that to really achieve what you want, you have to imagine it, think about it, almost to the point of obsession, and with a certainty based on the knowledge that one day you will get there.

This makes the setbacks, and tough times in your life a little easier to bear – because you know you are on track to getting what you want.

So many times in life, we have vague ideas about things we would like, or dreams we have, but they remain just that. Our tendency to ‘deal with things later’ means we don’t actually get what we want. This leads to a lifetime of ‘settling’ rather than using what years we have been given to the best of our advantage. In order to get what we want, we need to unlearn this lack of focus, and create some real, tangible goals.

Often times, the world of financial planning is simplified to just time horizons to retirement. I have found however, there is a new movement in the industry, where advisers and professional investors are now talking about goals. This means there’s a need to designing an investment strategy that matches the goals a person has in life.

Everybody is different, and what works for one, would not for another. So designing a financial strategy based on individual goals makes sense right? The industry is starting to see the light.

But in order for that process to be successful, you actually have to have clearly defined goals, and be able to articulate, and stick to them.

Loose goals, like travel, just won’t get you there. There is an easy process I can share with you to start defining your goals – which you can then action with a good financial strategy.

1. Imagine your life in five years, 10 years and 20 years. What do you see yourself doing at each of these stages? What is your family like? What experiences do you want to have achieved in each of these periods? Take one page for each of those time periods and write a list. Put in as much detail as you can. Describe the experiences, and holidays in enough detail, that they start to feel real. You won’t believe the power of actually putting on paper the dreams you have for your life and your families.
2. On another page, write down all the areas where you spend in your life. Not the boring details, but the general overviews – mortgage, school fees, medical expenses, kids. Then start to look at these expenses against your time periods. In 10 years will your kids have left home? Will the school fees be over? Start to get an understanding of how your major expenses could shift over time. This will help you to focus on the bigger plan –and the fact that you can in fact build a financial plan that shifts as your life does.
3. Talk to your family, friends and colleagues about your goals. This helps to make them real to holds us accountable by saying them out loud. It also puts meat on the bones for you around how amazing it could actually be and how important it is to get there. By finding inspiring people at any stage of their life that you can point to and say, ‘I would like to be like that’, helps make it real. I met a lady in her 70s last week who was on the board of our children’s school. She spoke so passionately about her work on the board and how much she enjoyed it, that it inspired me to think that I would like to be doing that in my 70s. Bang. Another goal to add to my rather large list. Brilliant.

Once you have your goals, and they are real in your mind (and that of your family and friends), it’s time to put them into action. This will be explored in my fifth pillar of unlearning, suitably described as action. Some of you may well be able to create your own financial plans around your goals. I have never been that disciplined, or, to be honest, had that sort of skill set. This is why I have a financial adviser.

I can say without reservation, that a great adviser can be a brilliant asset to your life. I have no vested interest or financial gain in recommending this – I just know it’s has been the transforming piece of the puzzle for me. My husband and I now know what kind of life we want to lead – right into retirement; how much we want to spend along the way; and what we will end up with to leave to our kids when the party is done – all because we went through the process of advice.

To get you started thinking about your goals here’s a few snippets of inspiration. They have certainly helped me more clearly define what really matters to me.

[Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech: “How to live before you die”] – this is such a great reminder that we have limited time, so use it exactly as you wish.

[Patti Dobrowolski’s TED Talk: “Draw your future, take control of your life”] – this was voted one of the best TED Talks2015 – and for a good reason! It’s a great talk on why visualising and writing down goals really works.

[Goal Setting Workshop with Tony Robbins] – this is an audio feed, but it gives a good explanation of the power of setting tangible goals