Make Time Your Friend

As a kid, one of my favourite tv shows was Money by Paul Clithero. Super nerdy for a teenager but I just loved the content and would hang out for it every week. My childhood didn’t contain a smartphone or even internet for most of it… I am from the home encyclopedia era. There was really very little access to financial literature for most people and we didn’t talk about investments at home.
This show got me so interested in fact that it set off a chain of events that has seen me end up in the career of financial planning.

Investment is one of the areas in my profession that excites me most because you see, most of us don’t invest, especially in shares. It seems too complicated, a bit scary, and what are we even doing it for?
To me though, following 15 years in the profession and a great number of hours studying and reading investment papers, I understand it’s power.  If you harness the power of investment, you can drastically improve your financial well being…. over time.

Besides my laptop, my next most prized posession is a simple little financial calculator. Sometimes I get so caught up thinking about investment that I find myself crunching a bunch of scenarios on this bad boy.
For example, I would be thinking like this…. “right now I’m 35, so if I was to save $1,000 a month and invest that in quality shares earning 10% per annum, for the next 20 years, what would that give me?”  Then I do the quick calculation and BAM, the answer is $759,368. That’s not bad for an investment of $240,000 with no gearing involved. Talking to an engineering client the other day where we were looking at the end goal and working backwards from there, they said to me, “so basically you are reverse engineering” and I was like, well, yes! Just like my calculation above, we can do the same in reverse. So if you want to retire with $1,000,000 to generate $70,000 p.a. (7% rate of return) without touching your capital, you need to save X amount over Y number of years at Z rate of return. Obviously where you are now, what you have to work with, and how risk tolerant you are are all critical factors with financial projections.

Some of my personal scenarios fill pages, and I love it. This is precisely why I do it for other people. I get to help people just like you make the most of your hard earned money, help you achieve the lifestyle you want, and build some great friendships with clients who are as close as some of my family. It’s an incredibly rewarding and privileged position to be someone’s financial planner. I used to feel weird about the job title because of the “salesy” planners out there giving it a bad reputation.
But those days are pretty much behind us now (thank you Royal Commission) and I am proud of what I do.

But I digress. I’m here to talk about time. My superpower would be the ability to stop time if I could. So given that I don’t have a superpower, I just fit in as much as I possibly can. I used to say to people, we all have the same 24 hours, its going to pass anyway so I might as well fit in as much as I can. That’s the time when I was studying my Economics & Financial Planning Degree, having and raising three young children, working full-time in my business, playing hockey, and my husband was working FIFO so he was away 2 weeks out of 3 for quite some time.
This is an investment in self, and I’ve done it later than some (returning to uni at 23), but in the end that won’t matter because there are plenty of years ahead all going well.

Financial investment also does best when given adequate time to flourish. I love the analogy used by the Barefoot Investor where he talks about planting an apple tree. You need to plant it, look after it properly, and in many years time it will be sheltering and feeding your family.

Now taking this into account, think about what you could be doing better with your time and resources. What instant gratification/shiny things don’t you need right now, and therefore how much could you really start putting away for a rewarding financially free future? And if investment research is not your passion and you would like to get started, seek qualified advice from a fee for service financial adviser.

Shonel x

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Unless specifically indicated, the information contained in this blog is general in nature and does not take into account your personal situation. You should consider whether the information is appropriate to your needs, and where appropriate, seek personal advice from a financial adviser.

Shonel Vuletich is an authorised representative of Synchron, AFS Licence No. 243313.