Listening to his mates for investment advice…
Darren is another one of our clients it’s been an absolute pleasure to work with. He’s one of the most relaxed people you could meet which definitely makes our work together easier, but the best part for me has been seeing how easy we’ve been able to make Darren’s money management.
Darren is an executive who had just turned 40 when we met. He was great at his job and was being rewarded for his work with a solid income. Darren enjoyed having a great lifestyle, but he didn’t have as much to show for this income as he really wanted. Darren had been struggling through a problem I see way too often when working with our clients. Darren had got caught up in the investing hype, trying to choose investments that were going to make big money fast and had been suffering as a result. Darren was also spending a bunch of time on his money management and had been caught in the ‘juggle’, shuffling money around when he got paid, spending on his credit card, and clearing it each month but not making the progress he could have been with his savings and investments.
The work we did with Darren focussed around showing him the impact of the path he was following, how his future was going to play out. Darren quickly realised we needed to change some things to make it possible to if he was going to get to the point he wanted in a timeframe he was happy with.
As I mentioned Darren had fallen into a common trap with investing. He had some mates who were professional investors and they had been talking to him about some investment options that (in their words) were set to make big money. As most people do, Darren had got a little caught up thinking about the possibilities and put a good chunk of his savings into one of these investments shortly before we me. They had not gone well. I showed Darren the potential results he could get from taking on smart and considered risk in his investments, which helped him see he didn’t need to take huge or crazy risks in the hope of a massive payout which likely won’t come off.
Something I see often with time poor executives – if your money management is too hard or time consuming, it’s likely you’ll just give up and won’t get the results you want. So we helped Darren put some structure around his day to day money management to make his life easier. Because Darren was busy in his work and outside of work doing the things he enjoyed, he didn’t like spending much time thinking about or managing his money. So Darren was stoked with the Banking structure we set up because he had all his money going to the right places at the right times, and could remove himself from his decision making around money.
Now this didn’t all come together straight away, and there were a couple of hiccups and unexpected expenses along the way. But almost two years down the track and Darren is now in a steady rhythm with and starting to get some stellar results.
Here’s what Darren said about our work together:
“Ben has been an absolute pleasure to work with and provides clear and thorough advice. He has helped set up my finances so I am acutely aware of all flows and has effectively transitioned me from being financially naive to being confident, I am working toward a solid plan in a very short time frame. I’d recommend anyone looking to create or get on top of their financial plan to talk to Ben”
– Darren