Your Financial Trajectory
Which is why when we’re working with our private clients, our focus is on first identifying, then improving, their financial trajectory.
What’s this?
It’s the path your finances will follow over the course of your life.
As per the sample one below, there’s ups (your first job, buying your first home, building your nest egg) and there’s downs (bad markets, big expenses and using up your nest egg in retirement).
Your Best Financial Trajectory
This strategy will be built upon your personal, individual objectives. Which means that every person’s strategy is likely to be different.
I might see you in the morning and find out that you want to:
Stop working at 55.
Always have enough income to meet $100,000 of living expenses, in today’s dollars.
Take a sabbatical at 48, for twelve months.
Put both of your daughters through Lauriston Girls College.
Travel overseas every two years, for a month at a time.
Prepare for the day when your mother will need to move in with you and your family.
Your financial trajectory might end up going from the Current one above, to something like this:
Then, in the afternoon, I might meet somebody who earns the same amount as you, with a similar level of wealth currently but:
Wants to work to 65 at least.
Needs $80,000 a year to live.
Wants to start their own business in the next 2-5 years.
Has four kids under 6, that they want to attend public school.
They’d like to work in Bali for a year before their youngest goes to school.
May receive a large inheritance at some point in the next 10-15 years.
And their trajectory might become something like this:
As you can see, each path is – naturally – very different. We each have our own path to walk, in other words.
Similarities and Differences
When it comes to financial advice, then, our approach would be the same and the tactics we use would be broadly similar.
But the strategic plan for each of you would be drastically different.
Of course, along the way there’d be many inflection points where decisions need to be made, tactical shifts need to occur and unexpected events will jag the path.
But that’s why a strategic guide is so important – it lays out the planned journey and provides benchmarks, milestones and boundaries to help you make decisions on the fly along the way.
So, That’s What We Do
Which, at its simplest, is what we do.
We get to know you. Your individual circumstances, your fundamental needs, your hopes, dreams, aspirations, worries, nervousness and potential.
Then we map out a path that gets you from where you are today, to where you want to be tomorrow.
We then design an overarching strategy to maximise the chances of you walking that path.
And in that strategy, we deploy a range of tactics to help execute that strategy.
Then, at every step along the way, we’re there to help you make the best decisions in the pursuit of your own, personal, financial trajectory.
That’s what real financial advice is.