What Does a Financial Planner Actually Do?

My name is Jordan Vaka. I'm an independent financial planner with The Advice Gallery.

I've been a financial advisor now for a bit over 15 years. And what we're doing with the advice gallery is building a financial planning practice in conjunction with The Loan Gallery business. And the idea being that we want to help all the people that will help through the Loan Gallery on the financial planning side. And the focus around all of that is helping people make the best financial decisions they can.

What I thought we'd do is we're going to start this webinar series and keep it on a fortnightly basis. Just keep pushing out content and information that hopefully will be of some use some value to The Loan Gallery and product network. And we're starting at a real base level here. But I'm not sure if I'm mute to that noise at home, mute everything, so I'm just gonna roll with it.

You were standing in a row baseline level when best basically what does a financial planner actually do? There's, I think, some misconceptions, a little bit of confusion, a little bit of uncertainty around what a planet does, can do can't do that kind of thing. And there's obviously a little bit of distrust as well given what's actually occurred in the past.

So what I wanted to do today is talk to that a little bit, walk through how we work, what we do account some of the background considerations around the way that we do things as well.

So with that said, I'm going to hop on to the presentation now, please let me know if it's not working. If you can't see it, hopefully it's come through okay. Because we will start off with a riveting world of disclaimers.

It's not sort of relevant for this one, because we're not really going to be tackling anything that could be seen as advice. But it is important whenever you see a financial adviser speak or anything that written there's a distinction between personal advice and general advice. And general advice is stuff that we have not considered your situation. So don't act on anything in this presentation, or likely, any other presentation I do. Because it is not reflective of your individual circumstances. And in that case, sometimes it could be a really bad idea. So just be conscious of that we are recording today, the recording will be put up on the website. I think we also will be putting it through YouTube. And we're also going to just chop it up and share it amongst the social channels as well. Just to get the word out there too.

Okay, now, we will help you. The reason I wanted to start with this topic was really around some of the questions that I get asked all the time as a financial planner, can you help me with this? And it's things like what should I do with my Superannuation? How do I help people out with their insurance? Where should I invest my inheritance? should I buy this business is one we've been dealing with lately, which is really interesting thing. There's a lot of businesses kind of hitting the market. So this is becoming a growing area of our work. How do I pay my mortgage down faster? Really familiar. Really common one. And can you help me get the pension but which I normally mean the age pension? So all these questions, I love getting them. They all address parts of what I do as a financial advisor. But what I wanted to do a little bit today, so yes, we can answer those questions. But there's a broader picture, because my answer to all these questions lately, I've noticed is, well, “It depends”. And the kind of harks back to that general personal advice element. Because it depends on is the right answer is, because we don't know what people's circumstances are.

So there are some complexities around answering these questions. But these are the kinds of questions we get a lot of and I call these tactical questions. Because what we actually do is probably starts off more of a strategic picture. So what we really do is help people build their best financial life. So we get really clear on where people are now. And really, really clear on what they want for their future. And then we look at what's going to happen in between what decisions and actions can be taken in between to give people the greatest chance of building that life that they want, while also avoiding or protecting or mitigating those risks of things that we can't control. You know, there's phone calls at two o'clock in the morning and horrible doctor's appointments, those kinds of things, what can we do to manage that? So a big part of that job is helping people make better decisions, and therefore take better actions. And this is all in service of that idea of helping people build their best financial life.

At this point, I will check and skip across to the questions and answer and see if there are any comments or questions. If everybody could perhaps not mind put that on you. We're not seeing the sound is working.

I mentioned earlier, those FAQs fall into what I would call tactical questions. And this is an idea that I've come up against a fair bit in what we do. And it's this distinction between tactics and strategy. Now, the strategic picture or strategy is the overarching idea, the overarching plan of what we're trying to do. But tactics sit under that umbrella and contribute towards achieving that strategy. So a common example, particularly if you've been a client of mine and galleries is you may well have built a house with one of the big builders.

Now, the strategy is the blueprint, the master plan, the thing that the architects and the designers are put together to tell the guys on site, here's what we're doing, here's what we're building. Here's the final goal.

That's the strategic picture. The tactical picture is here are the auditions. Here's where they're putting the PowerPoints, here's where they're doing the wiring, they're making very discrete, very acute tactical decisions, the plumbers doing the plumbing, concrete is going down and slab, the carpenters are putting up a wall. They're all tactical elements, all in service of building that overarching strategy. And financial advice is similar in that we build the strategy first is when you are now here's where you want to go, here's the plan to get there. That's the strategic picture. Then out of that, we will say if you do A, B, C, D, E, F G, tactics that will give you the greatest chance of achieving that life.

So one way that I used to illustrate this is what we call a financial pyramid, this pyramid captures kind of the way that we approach things, because any  pyramid if anybody here has ever built a pyramid, amaze the sit on a really solid foundation, because as you go up the pressure of those things above it, if the things that the foundation level aren't strong enough, things will just sink into the sand crumble and eventually fade away. So it's not an important kind of starting for Capstone, you've really got to start with the foundation, like any ability, and the foundation in financial advice, or the aspirations and objectives of the individual people with speaking with.

There are a few important elements, their aspirations are things that you don't have yet that you wish to have in the future, or you wish to achieve in the future, where there is an element of time and money involved. So you might aspire to have a really nice retirement, having a financial life that's better than the one your parents had, or you want your kids financial lives to be better than the one you're having. You want to feel in control of money, rather than having money control you. These are really broad, really big objectives. They can also drill down into, you know, I want to go to Graceland in Memphis, I wanted to go to the house of elders. I'm speaking out of client kind of objectives that are that we've had recently, I want to cruise down the Danube, I want to see Moscow in winter and see the Northern Lights, those kinds of aspirations and a really fun nice things that we get to help people.

Falling out of federal, so objectives. So that might be I want to retire. These are more specific things, these are more detailed, acute things. So that could be I want to retire at 65 on $70,000 a year, I want to pay the mortgage off by the time I'm 45, I want to have a million dollars in assets outside of super before x. Now these are very specific, very discrete objectives, they will feed into that aspirational picture too. We need to know these things so that we can help set the route towards this destination. So it's, you know, when you have a GPS on a car, if you don't have a destination, all you're looking at is a bunch of streets. And that's kind of where we start with people at first because all we can see is the streets ahead of us. But until we start working out what destinations we're working towards, then we can start thinking about, “Okay, here's the best route to take, here's the best speed to take here are the issues we need to worry about here are the blind spots, black spots, etc.” So that's the foundation level of your financial pyramid, at least aspirations and objectives.

The next level up from that is kind of the financial hygiene aspect of people's financial arrangements. And it's broadly fall into four categories. The first one is work. And by work we mean what are you doing as an occupation? How are you divided up the household responsibilities? What kind of income are you bringing into the house and what kind of outgoings are involved in the budget?

So the advice that we do here is often around how do we allocate that budget? That's a big part of it, but also how can we help you, maybe, build your career? How can we help you focus on increasing your income and your outgoings, side hustle, that kind of thing? So it's cash flow work being part of people's financial position. The second one, obviously debt. Everybody on the call will have had debt at some stage, they may likely still have debt. So we will examine that. What kind of debt do you have “good or bad.” What are you repaying on? What are the interest rates? What's it used for is being productive, that kind of thing. And we'll get that optimized. And for each one of these elements, it is important that we understand it, how it works in your situation. But also, how can we improve it?

Do you have free credit cards and a personal loan and a mortgage with your head on, but the interest rates are really low, isn't going to be worth you combining them? It may not be, but it may be a risk and potential is a big thing. We're talking a lot about his trajectory of where you are now and where you want to go. The gap in between if all goes swimmingly, we'll get you there. It's fantastic. The thing is that nobody's life goes swimming all the time. We're all hit by things along the way. It can be awful things like car crashes, medical diagnoses, premature death, disability, can be things like divorce. It can be things like redundancy, unexpected inheritances, there's all these things that happen. In the meantime, risk and protection is about trying to identify those risks that are unique to your circumstances, quantifying those risks and saying, if this happened, here's the dollar impact to you and your family. And then working out how can we protect or avoid that risk? If not, can we mitigate that risk? If not, can we provide for that financial impact? So that's a discreet module as well, where we cover a bit of ground.

Legacy is another big one. You know, traditionally, it's very much, okay, it's estate planning, you need a well, you need a power of attorney, that kind of thing. It's bigger than that, though. It's talking about the kind of legacy you want to leave behind financially. What kind of financial legacy are we building in the run up to that inevitability? What kind of legacy do you want to leave your kids in terms of financial education and literacy? What kind of a legacy Do you want to leave through your work and your career, so there's a lot of mingling across here. But a falling out of that, we will put you in touch with a lawyer and have it all documented.

So the other four were called financial hygiene areas of a person’s life. Because if you can get all four of these as tidy as possible, all four of these optimized, it's going to accelerate your growth of the pyramid to the next stage.

So the people we work with, this is a fundamental element of their plan. Because all of this is in service of building a greater level of wealth and a greater level of net assets, and not for the sake of worthless or for the sake of pure greed. Like it's not a measuring contest, you know, $1,000,000 or $2,000,000, fantastic. But because of what those net assets and that that wealth can mean for you and your family. So the target number here is different for every circumstance, some people aim for $500,000, some people aim for $10 million or more, it doesn't really matter.

The key point is trying to identify exactly how much you need to have to achieve the life you want to live. And there'll be differences for each person. And then it's making sure that those four hygiene areas are as tiny as possible to help accelerate the growth of that net assets. And well, because if you've got excess cash coming from your higher than previous income, that's diverting towards either debt, which is helping build your net assets, or it's being diverted towards buying investments, which is also increasing your net assets, and you build up this body of assets by around you, because they will eventually, hopefully quickly, but eventually start paying you a consistent income.

And that consistent income, ideally passive. Regardless, consistent sustainable income is what your best financial life will be built on. Because there are not many people where their best financial life involves working 50 hours a week for somebody for a salary for the rest of their life. Because what that does as noble is that word is it constrains your options. And to me, your best financial life is one with fewer constraints. And the way that you shave off some of those constraints is you build a net asset position to drive consistent income to give you some options. And again, this isn't a matter of just trying to grow the highest income for the sake of showing off or greed as because that will act in service of building your financial freedom. And this is the capstone I was talking about earlier. How do we get all the people we work with to build towards this idea of financial freedom?

Now, this is not a short-term project. This is not something we can answer over lunch, even in a year or two years. The aspirations and objectives typically take a little while for us to get people to articulate it could be a week or a month and they change.

So we've done a lot of work traditionally, with people going through divorce, their aspirations before, during and after the divorce are drastically different, that's fine. Let's make sure we allow that. The work around the hygiene stuff could take a year, two years or three years, depending on your circumstances, depending on how much complexity is involved, and your appetite for getting things done quickly. If you want to do all that at once, rip the band aid off, you're probably going to die in a year.

If you don't want a dining table covered in paperwork, and a really confusing model of stuff, probably allowed two to three years, then assets and wealth, the sooner you start up, the better you let things like compounding and diversification in the market, do its thing. But you're looking really depending on how much you get put in a build, like a corpus of wealth behind you looking at least five years, probably 10, realistically, around a 10-to-15-year mark, you'd like to start seeing some consistent income coming in. And then you're looking at that financial freedom.

So overall, this is what you're looking at this building this ideal financial life for yourself as being somewhere around a 10-to-15-year project.

But in saying that, I always wonder if you if you're not doing this, what are you doing? And is it in service of that idea of financial freedom? If so wonderful. If not, this is probably a project structure you'd like to implement in your own life. And that isn't to say you need to do it through an advisor. Yeah, a lot of this you could do yourself.

Yeah, it's like anything, you could design your own house, could build your car, I could walk the whole lot from services. But you could do all those things. Or you can engage an advisor to help you with the process as well.

So we're drawing a big strategic picture, we've got the big strategic picture of the pyramid, then is looking at the tactical aspects. And this is where I'll try to do a bit of a brain dump about all the different areas that advisors can help with. Artemisia I'm sure I'd have, but in broad, sort of broad terms you're looking at tactics are mainly relating to things like products, so financial products, your Superannuation, your insurances, your loans, things like that bank accounts. So the main areas that we look at here, so if you look at the assets and wealth area, any investment vehicle that you use, or could use, we can advise on, broadly speaking, stay away from crypto just because. Yes, it's like Pandora’s box.

But you know, we review bank accounts, we have a lot of people renew their time deposits. We look at fixed interest in bonds, it's been a real horror show the last couple of years, we help people decide between properties, often people will come to us and say, look, we've got we want to buy an investment property. How do we do it? So we walk them through the process, and then we put them in touch with somebody and organize the finance, often their friendly line gallery broker, and then we can help them run the numbers on what that investment property will look like. There is this idea, I think, in the market, that financial planners are against property, because traditionally we put it bluntly, we didn't get paid for helping with it. Yeah, the idea used to be that you found all the investments in house, chuck a percentage on that. And that's how the plan has made their money.

Most don't work like that anymore. We short held up. So probably the last is just another asset. One of the good things about being independent is I can say hand on heart, I don't really care where your money goes, as long as it's in the service of building your best financial life.

So people will come to us with an investment property and give us the specs and the expected rent, the purchase price, other costs, things like that. And we'll plug that in and say yep, this is a good investment, because it's going to get you closer to that point of financial freedom. Or say this isn't a good investment because you're not making enough money on it. You need to see historically outrageous growth to get to the point we sell.

So again, it's horses for courses, all advice should be. Yeah, we look at shares, we look at our shares, we're not a stockbroker, I'm not going to sit here and put together portfolios of people shares, but we use ETFs. We use index stuff just to get people exposure to the share market.

Debt Management is very much about the best plan to start reducing your debt, make as much of your debt good debt as possible, and then get rid of it. Because remember, the target we're looking for here, we're looking for here and his middle bracket is your net assets and wealth.

I'm more impressed by somebody that owns a million-dollar house and a $500,000 mortgage than somebody that owns a $5 million house and a $4.9 million dollar mortgage. The assets are almost irrelevant. Your net assets that's what you get to keep them if we do a good portfolio management people already have their investments in place, we can to help ram that and make sure we're achieving the desired yield, managing, if attacks all that technical stuff.

SME advice, like I said, it's a growing area. This is small, medium enterprise advice. We work with accountants and lawyers to basically optimize the business. So make sure you're running that as well as possible. But then also, how do you extract the wealth from a successful business into your own name tax effectively, but also put it to work effectively? There's no real point making $300,000 in a business, if you're spending $300,000, outside? How do we transform that performance into wealth. So it's a really cool part of what we do. Risk and protection ultimately boil down to insurance. But the big part is the risk assessment review. That's where we go through that process of what kind of risks do you face in your life.

Retirement again is a traditional part of financial advice that I think most people see as the good trigger point to speak to an advisor. A lot of that falls into things like Superannuation and contribution planning early on for our 35-year-old client, we would put together a contribution plan for them and show them if you just did work contributions, you'd end up at x. If you put in an extra 200 bucks a month, 100 bucks a week, whatever it was, you'll end up at x plus y can show them the benefit of that. But then once people are actually across the threshold, and they're into retirement, we'll help them organize their account-based pensions, their income, their annuities, their Centrelink, allowances and entitlements.

A note on retirement, the best time of saying advisor is about five years prior to retirement, you don't need to work with them every year in the meantime. But several, five years out, get everything structured, get the base of the pyramid, clean and set up. And then if you can, if you want to step back, step back, and then get back in touch with them about six months before you retire, just to push the button on everything.

Cash flow, we do a lot of budget planning a lot of trajectory modeling, which I'll come back to in a second, but also following the improvements you can make, and to show you the benefit of that.

So in other areas of financial planners help with and what we can actually do again is legacy. So some of my most meaningful meetings have been with people around their plans and intentions and their final issues for about one at the end. It's obviously a very confronting topic. But I find that once people have that discussion, they don't have to think about it. Again. It's all documented, and then it's put to the lawyer. So it's a bit of peace of mind, exercise.

Now, I've done a few pre pre death transfers, and this is getting quite grim for lunchtime presentation. But frankly, if somebody knows that they're going to die in the next three to six months, there are things you can do to make that process financially easier. Not personally, but financially, you can avoid tax, you can restructure things, you can make it all flow a bit easier. On tax planning, you want a specialist accountant, allowed here, if anybody here has ever been an executive, hat’s off to you, it seems like a very thankless job. It's also as I'm learning, I was talking to a tax accountant the other day, quite a high-risk job as well. There's a lot of liability that comes with being an executor. So definitely think twice or think hard about becoming one.

And bequest planning, we do some stuff we help people kind of allow for maybe charitable bequests also request a family beyond their immediate family and trying to chair a family meeting. So those requests don't catch anybody by surprise, if so desired.

The debt was talked about, you know, a big part of our work is helping people reduce their debt. Pretty old fashioned, I like to see debt going down. It is used often to buy investments and things like that. That's cool. Haven't seen a spike. But it's really like to see it going down. We see a lot of people that have investment properties that they've had for a long time and the deaths kind of just stayed at that 80 or 90%.

I get this theory and the strategy behind it. But just for me personally, I like to see that gap widening the value of the property growing and the debt decreasing. That's how people build real wealth.

And obviously, your pyramid. So the baseline projection, where you are now where you want to go, what's happening in between, and we do a lot of scenario analysis, you know, what if we pull this lever? What if we can reduce expenses by five grand a year? What if we invested that money in shares instead of just sitting in the back offset versus Super Pac Man stuff?

A big part of what we're doing and actually an area of a lot of focus for us lately and probably for a while now bigger future tracking of setting tracking and modifying milestones, I think, a 35-year-old person, there's no point really talking to them about what 65 is going to look like, unless you have milestones along the way. Yeah. Get 25% ahead of your mortgage 50%, 75%, mortgage clear vibe will be just cleared that kind of thing I think increases motivation and determination. So that's an area we really focus.

I will just hop across quickly to see if there's any questions, I believe there are sure and always will be coming up. So that's cool. So we're in the final kind of stage of the presentation. So if there are any questions, please flip them through.

Because what I want us to talk about now will kind of cover the areas that an advisor can help with, out of the areas of kind of the questions we can ask but also the way we approach the process, I wanted to talk now through the mechanics of the actual process and the financial planning process. If you've never worked with a financial planner before, it's probably fairly straightforward. But I also know it's very different to working with other people. So I know this is very different to working with my accountant, very different working with a lawyer, they tend to be much more immediate. It's probably most akin to working with a broker. When I think of the six steps all up.

There's the initial meeting step, there's the discovery phase, where we get some of the specific info we need. Just preparing the advice, presenting the advice to you, that's where you actually see it. And that's where it becomes able to think in terms of liability gloves, when the rubber hits the road, we then implement it. So the recommended changes we've made, the ones that you've decided to proceed with, we then execute on that. That's an important distinction, too. We give you advice, you are more than welcome not to proceed with that advice. I hate the idea of people feeling pressure to do something because of what we've said. If you decide to implement all some or none of our advice, that's completely your prerogative. Our job is to give you that advice, give you the context that shows you the consequences good and bad of proceeding or not proceeding. So allow you to make an informed decision about your financial life.

We're not going to sit here and take it personally if you decide not to proceed with a recommendation, genuinely, it's completely your call.

And the final one is that tracking phase that milestone phase, those reviews, the traditional financial planning model that you may have come across that six, stage six becomes almost into perpetuity. So it's a review every year as an ongoing relationship, which can be incredibly valuable. In our business, this is a much more optional pathway. My preference is to build those base foundation, and the hygiene level work of people to get down into a fairly intensive project. And then if they need, we think that they need ongoing help to help build that net wealth and consistent income, we'll recommend that. But otherwise, often getting you set up and in really good shape means that you can probably wait a few years before we speak again, ideally.

But it really is again. It's an offensive term, horses for courses.

Yeah. broad overview very much. This is our process, which we're going to go through in more detail in our third webinar in a series, which is about how we specifically work where you'll meet the team and things like that. But going through these steps, you'll be referred to me in some way or another. Maybe finals famous online, the more likely you've probably gone to your broker and said, “Hey, I've got this question. Can you help me with that?” And they’ll say, “well, it's not my area, but have a chat with Jordan.” Once that happens, they'll send them an email, we'll organize a time to have a quick call on the phone. Sounds like something I can help with; I will then send you a link to book you in an exploration meeting.

This initial meeting is not a time, like you don't have to bring paperwork. You know, I don't really care what your super balance is there. When you earn what you spend. That's not relevant in that meeting. That meaning is all about getting to know what are your current commitments and obligations in life? What are your aspirations that you'd like to build into life that involves financial element? What are some goals that you have for your life and for your family? And what are some of the roadblocks and speed bumps that might come you might come across on that journey where you are now to where you're going? Well, certainly it goes for about 60 to 90 minutes, we charge $495 for that meeting, including GST. Ideally, it's held in person, but we can do it via video. If that's kind of the only option. Coming out of that process, you'll get a feel we'll get a feel of whether or not wearing good fit. If we are wonderful. Let's move to the next stage. If we're not, we'll help you find the solution for your question. Hopefully. You don't want to kind of leave you hanging but we also recognize we're not the right fit for everybody.

If we are a good fit and we move on to the next stage. That's a discovery and you will have been through this with your broker. This is where we get into the nitty gritty, you know, we want to see pay slips we want to see bank account details we want to see superfans insurances employment contracts, sometimes if you have a self-managed super fund will need trust deeds, investment strategies. This is where we started collecting all the information, we know securely, we send you a link to a portal where you can upload it all nothing via email, we then take all of that data, and we collate it into our system.

And that process is a discovery meeting where we sit down and we fill out the traditional form qualified, what's your date of birth, or the kids’ names? What's your address, want us to we'll talk about risk, kind of your tolerance for risk. We'll talk about insurance, all of that. So that's kind of that meeting where we gather all the information about it, we then go away with your permission, or we speak to your product providers. So I will call you super fat, which if anybody's called this super fund in the last two years, might be our most appreciated service. Because not everybody has 40 minutes to sit down. We'll call them and we'll get the information we need. And we're talking really arcane stuff here. Eligible service days, investment allocation, insurance, policy documents, things like that. I call it all because we're trying to get a really good picture of your financial situation as it is today.

Taking that information, we then step over to stage three, this is where we start preparing the advice for you. So we know you as a person, we know where you want to go. We know where you are now. We know your financial situation. We know the background; we know what you hold. Now, when you've held in the past, we tend to get together we say okay, what is the current path? And is it going to get them close to the goals that they're looking to achieve? If it is, let me just say that's our favorite advice to write or don't change anything you're doing really, really well. Love that. But more often than not, it's you require X dollars to achieve when you look into do we have you on track for x minus 30%. So we need to have a conversation around tradeoffs. Do you still want to achieve everything? Or improvements? We can have that conversation because we're preparing that advice. We develop the strategy; we explore all those different kind of tactical areas to try to be perfect for you. So what should I do with my Superannuation? “Well, Mr. Client, this is quite based on our understanding of your circumstances. And based on where we know you're heading now, if you move to ABC super fund, you will save 30% on fees for the next 20 years, that's going to add an extra 10% to your final closing balance without doing anything else.

Step two, if you then also maybe start co-contributing or using a spouse contribution strategy or other tactical things, you'll add an extra 8% here in total.” So we can bring all these things in our kind of repertoire onward, to bear against your situation to give you the best chance of achieving that figure of X.

So it's not only for a parent into a formal document, but if you've ever worked with an advisor, you will have seen these before, there's two, there's a statement of advice, which is the formal document that captures the advice very legal, very detailed ours are about 20 to 25 pages on average. I have heard stories or 120-page ones, they're pretty nonsense, or ROA which are records or advice their amendment ones. So you get a statement of advice Day One, two years later, nothing else has changed. But usually, the update things will tweak things, you get a record of advice. Very binding documents very formal, can be quite detailed. So what we like to do is when we get to stage four is presented in a way that suits you. So will even ask you earlier on, how would you like us to present this advice. Traditionally, generally, what I do is I record a video up about 20 to 30 minutes walking through the advice on the screen.

As I say that I realized how boring that sounds. It is a PDF on a screen, my little apple big head in the corner, reading through the plan, but explaining and going through it in detail. And we've had really good feedback around that because it means you're not getting a really dumped on you in a meeting room and having to make a decision. We have people skip back and forwards they watch it together they watch separately. It's really, really useful.

As part of that, we then book a meeting to go through it. That meeting then it's a little shorter because we're both familiar with advice. It's more around questions, alternatives, and just trying to clarify things.

A key point I want to make here and again, it's harkening back to that benefit of being independent. You will never get any rush from us. We had a few cases earlier this year where we had to get super contributions done before the end of June. So there was a little bit of urgency then. But we have to if people decide not to do it or not get back to us. It's no skin off our nose like it's only we only recommend things that are in your best interest because if you decide not to do that, live your prerogative. You will not get the hard work from us in a meeting, you will not get a rush to sign thing. This is your financial life you're talking about you are in control of every decision.

With whatever you decide to do after that, we move to stage five. And that's where we start implementing the changes. So my team, pretty much just amazing. And then they will get the volumes of paperwork prepared for it. I'll get that out to you for review and for signing. Once they come back, they'll launch them, they'll walk them through the different product providers.

It's been an interesting evolve in that process often, and I'll follow that all the way through the conclusion. And I'll keep you updated along the way. And then once that's done, you get a congratulations mentioned, because this is not an easy process. I don't think it's a comfortable process for clients either like you, you're handing over a lot of responsibility here and hoping that it goes well. So we thank people, we appreciate that. And then as I said, coming out of that we may recommend that you engage us for stay at step six, we may recommend that you come back to us in a year or two or three years. But we like to meet up at least once a year and essentially go through this process again, because people's situations and lives changing.

Divorces happen, injuries happen, and losses happen, things like that. So the review process is really valuable. But just with the costs involved, I'm always really conscious of the value that might come about.

Speaking of costs, you may have seen on our website, we have some minimum costs. This is more just trying to put it Yeah, just so you know. And they don't even cost for an engagement is $3300, including GST $495 for the exploration meetings. So here, all other meetings are included in that other fee.

Oh, yeah, occasionally, occasionally, an hourly rate is more appropriate, depending on what you're asking. If it's really open ended, or if it's really specific, we charge $440 an hour about with a minimum of three hours.

Often this yellow line says it is arbitrary. It's the yellow line. I spoke at the very start of this around general and personal financial advice. General advice and factual information. If you're making a decision based on that, you need to be very careful because the information you've received doesn't reflect your circumstances.

Often, so the line here, nothing we will have done before that shouldn't be seen as advice. It's something that I'm very conscious of, it's something that, obviously we're very trained in our approach. But up until that point, you have not received financial advice. So please don't act on anything. Up until that point, after that point, once we've given you the advice, you've been advised, then we can proceed with what's in that document. Because that document says very specifically, Mr. Mrs. Klein, here on my very detailed understanding of your circumstances, your goals, your wishes, your worries, your fears. And here are the specific steps I'm recommending you take to do that. It's very personalized. And those recommendations fall in what we call our DURT process, D-U-R-T, every recommendation you will see in the document the downside, the upside, the risks are the tradeoffs, because I want to make sure that you can make an informed decision. Because as I move along in my career, increasingly the recommendations are. It's always good to lay out but they're not always black and white. Yeah, it's often if you do this, you will lose that. But here's why we think it's worth doing. So it is important. From stage four onwards, we're working under advice before that, it's really it's not advice. It's just getting to know each other.

Everybody, thank you so much. I feel like I've rocketed through that. I think we're finished well ahead of schedule. So if you have any questions, please feel free to pop them into the chat or the q&a.

Or send me an email Hello@theadvicegallery.com.au or call me on that number there. Love to have a chat.

It's one of the things I'm really excited about the advice gallery is this idea of the mission that we have, which is to provide personalized advice to as many people as we can to help the long gallery community make the best financial decisions and have the impact where we can we can help people increase the trajectory of their lives that's really, really exciting and something that I'm really, really keen on. So I'm enjoying it. Please join us for the upcoming webinars.

They are now the third one is how we work specifically which was covered in a little bit of detail there.

The other one will be equally riveting. Whatever it is. But we will be rolling them out fortnightly in the New Year as well. So my goal is to do this every fortnight from now on really by Christmas. So if there are any topics or anything you'd like to learn a bit more about, feel free to send them through. And we'll schedule that in as well by sharing and hopping across to the question and answer.

We have a question around sharing contact details. So yes, I'll put him in the chat as well, Sandy, does a financial planner help with self-managed super funds?

Yes. Is it kind of an overlap the area? It's a bit? The short answer is yes. We can recommend the establishment of a fund where we can help with the management of the investments and insurance within the fund. And we can recommend and help with the closure of the fund. An accountant will help you run the tax returns and the financial accounting for the fund as well. Often, they have permission like an exemption to recommend the establishment of a fund. And you will have an auditor each year audit the books of the fund. Individual insurance investors, real estate agents, things like that. I should flag I have a level of skepticism around SMSFs. I think for the right people, they're wonderful. But I think they've been pushed on people who sometimes aren't the right people. So we'll have to have a chat around that. If you have an existing finally, when a new fund, happy to have a chat. But just put my hand up on a little bit of a skeptic.

Any other questions? floating around? We'll probably hop off in two minutes. We'll make a quarter past.

Thank you.

Yeah, any other topics that might come up, please just send them through.

There's kind of a thing in our world that a lot of the topics that people hearing from people that have a real vested interest in proceeding with it. I'm thinking things like crypto gold, stuff like that. So if you ever come across anything like that, feel free to flick me through a question. I'm happy to tell the examiner exploratory.

It looks like that's all the questions. We might call it there. Thank you all for attending.