Salary Sacrifice is generally accepted as a great way to accumulate wealth … I’d bet many of you haven’t considered how a wealth creation strategy can provide you with wealth protection benefits at the same time. The remainder of this post explores this concept in more detail. (more…)
Let me firstly start of by saying I am not a regular watcher of ‘Home and Away’ …. however, part of the episode I saw last night prompted me to take this action…
In the episode, there was a situation where a Grandfather had passed away recently and the next thing the surviving family knows is that the local bank manager has taken possession of the farm. It became apparant that the family were not aware of the high debts the grandfather had incurred and were quite distressed at the imminent prospect of losing access to precious belongings and family memories.
A lesson if one can be taken from such a dramatic tragedy (which unfortunately happens far too regularly in the real world) is that: “with a little planning and communication, personal tragedy need not lead to financial disaster for those you leave behind”.
Many people look at insurance as a necessary evil – after all the best insurance policy is the one that never needs to be used. Many others don’t subscribe to insurance and instead subscribe to that misplaced aussie trait of “she’ll be right mate, it won’t happen to me”.
What this blog will attempt to do is provide information that reinforces the value of appropriate wealth protection solutions in protecting what is important for you.
Think about the title of the blog for a moment … the key message I take from this (after I take of my advisers blinkered sight) is what is important to you.
Determining “what’s important to you“ is a values based exploration that you (personally, either individually or collectively with your significant others) need to undertake before any appropriate solution can be developed. Traditionally the insurance product providers had calculators with a myriad of assumptions that could be entered to provide an “appropriate” level of cover. I believe the value based exploration combined with the challenges of your assumptions posed to you by your adviser provide a more appropriate means of constructing a wealth protection solution.
This link: Risk Presentation provides you the opportunity to access slides that I have previously used when workshopping wealth protection solutions in a group situation.
Those who participated found the group process beneficial, it provided them an opportunity to consider their own situation in the context of other peoples experiences and responses to various rhetorical questions. Some of these include:
Remember personal tragedy need not spell financial disaster for you or the loved ones you leave behind.
If you would like to ask more about this or would like to participate in a facilitated workshop please contact us.
Where to from here?
Dan Smith is self employed and is for many families their trusted Financial Planner based in Rockhampton. He has clients in various locations throughout Australia but predominately in Central Queensland and specifically the geographic area encompassed by the Rockhampton Regional Council.
In an earlier post “Tuning into the world’s best” we made mention of how and why we partner with MLC to access a team of highly skilled and highly qualified investment professionals working to ‘manage the managers’ on your behalf.
In this post we are providing a link to MLC’s website which will provide you more detailed information on the specialist investment managers MLC currently uses to build wealth for you as an investor (this is specifically for those with investments in the MLC Masterkey service). Information includes funds under management, corprate overview and investment style and speciaisation.
