Here at WealthDesign we pride ourselves on helping our clients wade through the tangles of the financial world. We like to educate our clients and as part of this, we provide knowledge about the industry as a whole. Our aim is to make the complex simple and help you, our valued clients and friends, achieve your life goals.
Going to see a financial planner isn’t only about investing money or buying insurance. It’s about enlisting the help of a long term financial coach. Someone who will be around long term and who has the experience to add value on a number of levels. Experience counts – it takes a long time to build up the broad depth of knowledge in financial literacy that is required to be a good financial planner.
Our job requires that we are constantly learning and upskilling. For us to help you, we need to be investing in the best technology and research available. We need to be working with your team of professionals – your accountant, your lawyer, and business or farm adviser. This is one of the reasons we tend to see ourselves more as financial coaches rather than wealth managers, as you get the best results with us as part of your financial advisory team.
For the past five years the world economies have been pretty turbulent and the value of good advice has been shown time and time again. It’s not always what investments you do have, often it’s the investments that you don’t have that can lead to successful investing. For example not having money invested in BridgeCorp, meant that our clients were protected from this disaster.
Timing counts and sometimes being very defensive is the best decision. Not all investments are bad and sometimes making an informed decision to invest is the right thing to do. For example, many WealthDesign clients invested in 2008 when everything screamed at investors to avoid the market at that time. These clients have received huge benefit and have been rewarded for their bravery. This investing wasn’t in blind faith. You need to know where your money is, who is making the investment decisions and who is involved in the investment. Research, experience and knowledge is invaluable, and for over a decade we’ve used the resources of our wider support team to provide this for our clients.
Unfortunately we have seen many examples of the impact of poor advice and crappy systems and the impact this can have on investors and their families. The key to all of this is to invest enough time to find the right person to give you the quality advice you deserve.
WealthDesign’s reputation has been built by being a ‘safe pair of hands’ in troubled times. We are gearing up for the challenges of the financial world in 2013. It’s an exciting time we live in, as the world around us keeps changing. But we’re up for the challenge.