Regardless of what words we want to put to our journey with our money, there are a few realities that we need to face.

First – everything we do is linked to money, whether we pay for it ourselves or rely on a benefactor.

Second – some of our wealth-generation depends on luck and circumstance, but most of it depends on our ability to intentionally earn an income and manage the money we have.

Third – our intention to earn an income is only so good as our ability to act on that intention.

Fourth – external factors will always influence the first three.

In the financial planning profession, there are many titles held and roles played by experienced and qualified people to help us engage with our money in a way that covers all four of the above points. Sometimes they can be handled by one person, and in other cases, you might choose several people to play the different roles in the journey.

Two popular titles are those of financial coach and financial planner. These two roles enable us to have different conversations with our money, and often overlap. A good financial planner will have skills that help you articulate your journey and align your goals and needs with financial products that will add value. The goal is to create a plan that you not only implement, but that can grow and mature with you, your family and your changing needs. This is why a financial planner is not simply a broker – they have skills and knowledge that will help you engage with more than just financial products.

A financial coach is less concerned with the products and the plan and will focus more on identifying behaviours and habits that are holding you back from experiencing the best value from your financial plan. Even the best-laid plans can be left to ruin if they are not appropriately implemented or are derailed by other events and external factors.

It’s helpful to know how these different conversations shape our overall ability to create and keep our wealth in a way that enables us to provide for ourselves and others. It’s easy to look at one area (typically the second or third) and ignore the others because it is a lot to keep in mind, and when we sit with each area, we can be overwhelmed with how intricate and complex they can be.

Working with planning and coaching professionals who are qualified and experienced can help you strengthen your vulnerabilities and fortify your strengths.

It’s easy to think about a financial plan and consider the elements that typically go into it. For instance, we could picture a plan that consists of a retirement savings product, life and health insurance, investment portfolios, and maybe a few things like trusts, wills and estate plans. Or, we could think about what a financial plan can help us avoid, and help us achieve.

When we think of our financial plan in terms of the products that comprise the overall portfolio, we risk becoming detached from our financial plan. For most of us, products are not interesting, and some of us find them intangible and boring. But – when we think of how these products can help us, or why we might choose them in the first place, we can increase our level of enthusiasm and engagement. This is when our financial plan starts to become a life-financial plan.

When life gets complicated, busy and full of stuff, we can quickly find ourselves with no direction or exit strategy – even if we have managed to save up lots of money and build what we perceive to be a successful life.

Life’s complexities make things messy, and through the ensuing stress and lack of quality time, we can miss obvious areas where we aren’t transferring business or work success into personal wealth and health. Spending quality time with people we love, engaging in downtime, and practising self-care are all important to our overall wellbeing and should be part of a better financial planning process.

There are also risks to consider and provide protection for, from income protection to health care provision. It’s not so much about the products we choose, but about the people and lifestyle that we choose to protect and provide for.

A better financial plan can help us consider risks and avoid them, and it can also help us achieve more in life as we integrate it with our daily choices. We can work towards things like 4-day work weeks, annual or quarterly holidays, or paying down debt to become less reliant on credit.

Inside of a financial plan that considers the people, the lives and the relationships – we can have complete peace of mind and confidence. Financial planning is not just about ticking boxes or trying to keep up with the Joneses; it’s about changing lives. We can only do this with better conversations when we sit down to work on financial plans, conversations that help us achieve and live the life we want with the money we have.

In the next few years, we are likely to see a significant increase in small businesses, from home enterprises to startups. Many people have had to create sideline income or recover from losing their jobs in a shrinking job market. Jobs seeing the fastest decline are in production or administration support, primarily due to automation and digitisation of platforms and processes.

With the meteoric growth of social media, personal marketing has become an attractive option for those who don’t have a budget for marketing and advertising. Leveraging digital marketing is an incredible way to build a small business, but one needs to be strategic about it.

When a business is started inside of an urgent need to generate an income, the entrepreneur’s focus is often on earning money as fast as possible. Two common pitfalls of this situation are that they either try to grow too quickly and can’t sustain the growth, or the marketing messages focus more on the product or service and not on the people using it and how they will benefit.

The first pitfall requires better business modeling and less marketing; the second pitfall requires better marketing.

Startups who are struggling with marketing often think that they have a problem with discoverability, but the problem could be more complex and harder to see. It was in the mid-1990s that Bill Gates said, “Content is king!” and it has formed the baseline strategy for most self-marketers, often to their detriment. Too much time is spent trying to create new content (or feeling bad for not creating content), and not enough time is spent on positioning and distributing content.

If you’re not relevant and not “out there”, the right customers and clients won’t find you.

To build relevance, you need to position your message well. When there is pressure to generate income, we focus on the money. Wherever we can, we must focus on the difference we make. Keep reminding people why and how you help them.

To be “out there”, you need to distribute your content. Social media is great, but it’s not the only way to find and engage with your network. Email, direct messaging, and live events are still incredible options. Any way to deliver content to your ideal client is worth exploring and exploiting. Don’t limit yourself to Facebook. 

Begin with the people who know and like you already, starting with your existing customer or client base and creating opportunities for word-of-mouth marketing. This is savvy distribution as you don’t have to manage it all yourself; you simply create the momentum (distribution) and the direction (positioning) and let your network sustain the flow.

They say that getting old happens slowly, and then all at once. Most of the change around us occurs so gradually that we barely notice it; ageing, losing or gaining our fitness, losing or gaining weight, intimacy in relationships, and debt and investing. These are some of the areas of incrementally-unnoticeable change with which we’re most familiar.

Often, our experience begins with gaining or losing “Just one more”. Just one more day before we arrange that video call, one more day of rest before returning to our exercise, one more helping of food before we’re full, one more credit account.

It’s okay to have just one more, in the wrong direction… as long as we can recognise when it’s a habit before it becomes unhealthy for us. Obviously, we’d like to be in the practice of having just one more in the right direction. For example, just one more lap in the pool, one more yoga video, one more glass of water, one more payment on my credit card.

When change happens slowly, it’s easy to think that nothing is really changing yet. This is why it doesn’t seem to happen until it happens all at once. We can carry small changes for a long time, but the longer we carry them, the more noticeable they become.

Debt and unhealthy financial choices can seem small and manageable when they occur, but slowly, over time and with compounding interest (in the wrong direction), we can become overwhelmed. This is because it’s not the weight that matters; it’s how long we’re carrying it for that matters.

Imagine holding a glass of water out in front of you. It’s easy to do because it’s not heavy. But what if you had to hold that glass of water in front of you for an hour or an entire day. What if you tried to keep it in that position for a month?

The glass doesn’t get heavy; our arm gets tired. The same is true for our unhealthy habits. We can think that accounts here and there, a credit card here and there, are manageable, but over time if we keep adding just one more, we will be overwhelmed.

Luckily, the same principle applies in the opposite direction! If we decide to make just one more payment on our credit card, instead of one more payment from our credit card, we will slowly start to pay it off.

If each day, week or month, whatever is workable, we decide to reinforce one more healthy habit and release one more unhealthy habit, we may not see any change until all at once; we’re debt-free, healthier and happier. Not because of what we have, but because of the person we’ve become.

‘Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought,’ Marcus Aurelius.

How we engage with our money reflects what’s going on inside our heads, which is an extension of what’s going on inside our hearts. They’re all connected.

Our feelings affect our thoughts, which in turn direct our actions – but we can also turn that around by changing our actions to create new patterns of thinking, which in turn can change the way we feel about things. Regardless of the direction that change takes place, our mind is at the centre of this process.

This means that the actions we take with our spending, savings and investing (our money habits) will not only be shaped BY our thoughts, but can also shape the way we think and feel. It is why we often experience cognitive dissonance, or buyers remorse, after making money decisions.

The term cognitive dissonance describes the mental discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. When there is an inconsistency between what people believe and how they behave, it motivates people to engage in actions that will help minimise discomfort.

Buyer’s remorse is an example of post-decision dissonance, where we feel stressed by a decision and seek to decrease our discomfort. Purchases that require high amounts of effort but do not bear high rewards are likely to lead to buyer’s remorse. If we focus on them, these thoughts will contribute to a largely negative mindset.

If we always regret purchasing risk products that protect us in emergencies or ill health, we will be more inclined to cancel those policies. It’s hard to spend money on something that will only benefit us in the uncertain future; cognitive dissonance will be fueled by thoughts that are inconsistent with trusting the process. If we are constantly looking for immediate gratification (spending and receiving, investing and seeing growth), our minds will be limited, and our thoughts will affect our feelings and actions.

Marketers know this well, so in most product booklets, they begin with a congratulatory message for choosing their product. If we want to shape our minds, we can set up systems of support that help us remember why we’ve made certain decisions that will be healthy for our future self. This is how we ‘hold in thought’ the choices to keep a healthy mind when it comes to our money (and all other things in life!). 

Support systems include working with a financial adviser that we trust and keeping a written record of our financial plan and policy portfolio (a one-page overview is a great start). We can also set milestones for moments of celebration and acknowledgement, like clearing our debt, saving a specific amount of money, or improving the way our family communicates about money. The bottom line is this: the more we think about something, the more likely it is to manifest in our lives. So if we keep thinking that we will never have enough money, we will most likely never have enough. But, if we learn to work with all we already have and hold thoughts of gratitude and awareness of our abundance, we will continue to have more than we need. It will directly affect how we feel about our money and the habits we form.

We all know that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. Even after we’ve gone, taxes are still levied against our estate. The more money we make, the more money the taxman looks to take.

Tax can be a serious stumbling block in our financial mindset, especially when we think about all the ways in which we are taxed, where that money goes and how it is ultimately invested into our community, whether it’s local or across the entire country. As we also know, most of our success in life happens in our head; how we think and what we think about are crucial to making healthy decisions and choices. So, if there’s a mental stumbling block, we need to flatten it or learn how to jump it.

First, we can change our perception of tax and accept that there are elements that we will never fully agree with. This is because tax is not just for us, but for everyone else too and whilst you can keep some of the people happy some of the time, you can’t keep all of the people happy all of the time.

We can think about our country like a country club. Every country club offers benefits to its members, and in order to enjoy these benefits, membership fees need to be paid on time. This keeps things equal, and it keeps the country club in a position to keep providing benefits to its members. The committee that runs a country club needs to account for ensuring that the ideals of their community are upheld and maintaining the facilities with the membership fees paid.

It’s a simple illustration, but it’s a helpful way to understand that when we choose to live in a country, we too need to pay the fees to maintain the resources, infrastructure and ideological leadership. The complexity with tax is that we move from a couple of hundred people in a very similar demographic to millions and millions of people across multiple demographics. But at its core, if we understand that tax is designed to help us contribute to shared resources, we can start to flatten or jump this mental hurdle.

Second, we can change our behaviour when it comes to earning money and paying taxes. Life is already so busy and complex, if we don’t pay regular attention to our money and our taxes, we will always find ourselves rushed and stressed over the tax season. Here are a few things to do differently this year:

1. If you’re not money savvy (most of us aren’t), find a financial adviser, planner or coach who you trust and make sure you have regular meetings with them.
2. Keep track of your income and your spending. This is the fundamental basic law of good money management; your financial adviser will help you with this.
3. If you don’t pay tax every month, keep a small savings account active where you can pay your estimated tax. Smaller monthly amounts are far easier to stomach than bi-annual or annual payments. You’ll also accrue interest on the saved money, which will help you when payments are due.
4. When you check in with your financial adviser, stay up to date with tax exemptions or tax-free savings initiatives to maximise your financial potential, both in the short and long term. These options and rulings are often updated in annual budget speeches and will affect how you move towards financial independence.

Being tax savvy is not about working hard at the end of the tax year; it’s about understanding that tax is part of our daily financial planning. If you need to chat – let’s set up a time and ensure your financial situation is at its healthiest.

“Remember the past, plan for the future, but live for today, because yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come.”

The best time to live is in the present. It’s easy to get lost in a daydream of how life could have been different or how good life used to be. It’s equally easy to succumb to the speculative dreaming of what might happen in the future.

Believing in a better future is hope, and being confident of what we hope for; that is faith. Faith is grounded in the reality of the past; hope is looking to the anticipated reality of the future. In this way, to truly live with purpose today, we need to remember our past and plan for our future.

But there is a difference between thinking about the past or future and living in it. Sometimes we live in the past because it’s familiar; we know what happened; there are no surprises. So too we might live in the future because we are deeply dissatisfied with where we are.

When we dwell on thoughts to the point that they consume most of our energy and attention, this is when we move from thinking to dwelling. As the old proverb goes, “home is where the heart dwells”.

When the past was really good, we can be tempted to live in our memories because just thinking back on it gives you a feeling of comfort and happiness. And, if the past was really bad, we can live in the future seeking the same comfort and happiness.

We need to identify this in our lives because we can’t change the past and we cannot predict the future. The only place we can make changes is in the present moment. No matter how certain our plans might be, if some major event happens, that can all dissipate into the ether with the snap of a finger.

Being present to our present is where we regain and maintain control of our power to choose. When you speak to people with children or people on their deathbed, a common regret is missing their kids growing up or wishing they’d spent more time with their loved ones.

If you feel like you’re not quite focussed enough on the present, grab a journal and a pen and jot down one of these questions on each page. When your mind wanders and you find yourself dwelling on something that is taking you away from the present moment, jot it down on that page. This will help you release it from your focus, but still, be able to recall it to help you in your planning.

1. Is there one particular period from the past that you find yourself clinging to?
2. Are you frustrated with where you currently are in life?
3. What causes you to be anxious for the future?
4. What are you most grateful for in life?

Whilst these are helpful life questions, they’re also rooted in the core motivations for how we work with our money. When we can slowly break these questions apart and work through them, we can start to understand our money better and embrace what it means to remember the past, plan for the future and live for today.

As financial planning conversations deepen and explore more value, we find ourselves moving from the empirical to the emotional, from processes to perceptions and from products to people. It’s an enlightening journey that takes us away from numbers and allows us to reflect and reconstruct our future planning approach.

But, it’s also extremely challenging as we find questions we can’t easily answer; but, that’s still healthier than having answers we can’t question! This point of reflection helps us form questions that enable us to navigate the flow and rate of change around us. The questions empower us to see choices more clearly and engage with our life and financial plan in a significant and impactful way.

But, before we make any changes to our investment portfolio, there are some helpful questions to ask. A recent article from fbfs.com offered several questions; here are some of them.

Am I working with a financial adviser I can trust?

In the same way, our personal and professional relationships depend on strong bonds of trust; our relationship with our money needs the same foundation. And, this begins by working with a financial adviser we can trust.

We all have blind spots (which is why financial advisers ALSO NEED financial advisers for their personal portfolios!), so it’s not just about working with someone our bank recommended; it’s about working with someone who we know, like, and trust.

How have my circumstances changed?

Some life changes are apparent, and we don’t need someone to help us spot them, but other life changes are slow and gradual. When we’ve been working with a trusted financial adviser, they can help us track and identify the gradual changes that will impact how we invest and plan for the future. Not all life changes require a shift in funds, but some might. This is how we build an investment strategy that consistently reflects what is important to us.

Has there been a change in my risk tolerance?

Various factors influence risk tolerance, but one of the most significant is our investment horizon. Ask yourself: “Has my financial timeline changed?” For example, if you’ve decided to move your financial independence (retirement) date, this might change your investment strategy. Your financial situation or a change in your risk preferences could also trigger tweaks to your investment portfolio.

Are any of my funds underperforming?

This is probably the question we ask ourselves most… but it’s also one of the most detrimental if not answered correctly. A bad week, month or even year may not be a valid cause for concern for long-term investment strategies. However, consistent poor performance over several years may yield a legitimate concern and reason to reflect on your fund selection. But, even so, it still needs to be taken in the context of the entire portfolio and the outcomes for which we’d hoped.

No matter how much we plan and how meticulous we might be, things generally never go directly according to plan. So there will always be reasons to feel like we need to switch funds; some will be valid, others won’t be. Hopefully, this blog helps you prepare for your next financial planning conversation!

“If I had a penny for every time I put something off until tomorrow, and never got to it… I’d put them all in a sock and hit myself with it.” Unknown

In our digital age, it has become increasingly easy to create lists of things to do and remember. We can just call out “Alexa!” or “Hey Siri!” and add to a virtual reminder list that, for the most part, just adds more stress and clutter to our lives.

If you’re smiling, you’re not alone. All of us have lists filled with great intentions and a serious challenge regarding follow-through. This is not necessarily because our lists are too long (although that may sometimes be the case); several factors can influence our ability to see our goals through to completion.

Take a moment to breathe in some kindness and let’s look at a couple of tips together.

Whether you’re sitting with a diary for a new week, month or year in front of you, here are some great ways to create goals that are easier to achieve.

1. Measurability is massive!

Vaguely huge goals, such as “get out of debt” or “go on an overseas holiday”, seem specific, but they’re not measurable.

“My best advice is to write down your goals in SMART format,” says Kate Mielitz, an accredited financial counsellor and assistant professor at Oklahoma State University.

As a reminder, the SMART acronym stands for specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic and timely. In other words, you want your goals to be something that you can see progress towards and achieve in a relatively short period. This is how goals become measurable.

So – instead of saying “get out of debt”, it is better to set a weekly goal to pay 500 bucks towards your credit cards. Setting something as specific as this helps you determine how sustainable that goal is. If you meet this each week, you might want to increase it; if you can’t meet it, you might want to reduce it, making the goal more realistic and timely.

2. Visibility is valuable

One of the issues with virtual lists is that we can’t always see them, and they’re tucked away neatly behind an app or in a folder in the cloud somewhere. Many of us are visual beings, and we like to see things. Remember that phrase when we were kids – out of sight, out of mind? It’s true for our goals. 

There are plenty of coaches who advocate using a vision board for our goals. This is because it makes our goals super visual and keeps us present to them throughout the week. If a vision board is too grandiose, have a pile of post-its that you can jot your goals on and stick them inside your cupboard. Then, every time you meet a goal, rip off the sticky square and toss it away in the bin.

Another helpful way to meet our goals is to have an accountability partner. Financial goals are no different – having a financial advisor who is in your court, knows how you make choices and what you want to achieve in life is highly beneficial to making your goals easier to achieve.

At the end of each day, remind yourself that you’re not alone and that tomorrow is a new day where you can keep working towards something new and awesome!

As we build businesses and seek to create various income opportunities, we are always confronted with the challenge of pricing. It’s a challenge because all of our situations are different.

Those with qualifications and experience often charge more for their time. But it’s not a sure way to work out billing and costs; sometimes people feel very confident in the value they’re bringing, so rather than looking at the time and experience they bring to their hour of work, they look at the value it brings to the consumer. 

Another differing factor is how much money we all need to make each month to provide for our families and responsibilities.

Regardless of how we reach that “golden number”, the underlying view of all of these approaches assumes we will work out our billing based on a finite amount of hours in the day. So – if I need to earn forty grand, I need to earn x-amount per hour. The problem with this approach is that we lock ourselves into a certain amount of billable hours to cover our costs and make a profit.

The flip side of this coin is that we could say that if we work more hours, then we can earn so much more. If we’re not disciplined, we can become caught in a situation where we become overworked and unbalanced.

So – perhaps, instead of asking how much time we have or how much money we want, we can set a baseline of determining what our time is worth to us. It’s a simple change in perspective that places value on our time rather than how much money we can make.

This immediately places us in a position to start asking new questions about how we perceive and assign value. We start to think about other things that we would rather do with our time if we didn’t need to earn off each “working hour”.

It separates us from the spreadsheet of hourly rate vs hours worked and looks at questions of physical, mental, relational and spiritual health. Instead of weighing up the value of an hour against how much money we earn, we can consider how it has benefited our overall well-being.

As we open ourselves to these different questions, it’s much easier for us to start creating a life and financial plan to which we can feel fully committed. We can set metrics that are independent of market performance, intuitive to our goals and in line with the journey we’ve chosen.

So – how much time is your money worth?