Luckily, her employer provides higher than mandated superannuation contributions at 12% per year so she has built a healthy superannuation balance.

Amelia is worried that she isn’t contributing enough to her financial future.  While she has a great wardrobe, lovely car and has travelled to many different countries, her lack of financial progress has been nagging away at her mind for the past couple of years and she finally took the plunge and met with some different financial planners to see if they could help. Her initial impression of financial planners was that they would help her to invest her savings and she was very concerned about finding one that was ethical and knowledgeable.

When she met with her Financial Spectrum financial planner, she was surprised by some of the questions that they asked and was challenged when asked some questions about her expectations about her future.  Amelia ended up discussing her plans for her career, travel and her dream house. She discussed the challenges she’s been having saving and also disclosed some of the reading she had done on finance and how it’s not worked very well to date.  With this information at hand, her financial planner was able to work out a rough timeline during their initial meeting that helped Amelia to prioritise all her various needs and wants for the future and start to make sense of what the future may hold.  A number of conflicts were pointed out to her and her preferences on those were noted.

After formally engaging with Financial Spectrum, Amelia’s financial planner developed four different strategies for her that encompassed most of her needs in various orders aligned with her priorities. For the first time ever, Amelia was able to understand the long term effects of the decisions that she was making and was also able to understand the various directions that were available to her and how certain sacrifices would lead to different outcomes. Of the strategies that were presented, one in particular appealed to her, so her financial planner worked with her over several meetings to refine it until she was completely comfortable with all the details within the plan.  The Financial Spectrum team then got to work with putting all the pieces in place.

As a result of her plan, Amelia has been able to significantly increase her savings as she genuinely understands and believes in what she is trying to achieve. She has since purchased her first property and has started a share portfolio that she is adding to regularly. She plans on setting up a SMSF in the next few years to continue to push her investments to the next level.  After a recent promotion, Amelia was able to achieve another first: she has managed to save more than half of her pay increase and is on track for buying her second property.

“It was like a light bulb moment for me – money and finances were just a blur and never really made sense to me. My financial planner has managed to break all the things I do down to small pieces and I now understand that what I do day to day is going to have a long term impact. I’ve never had much confidence with money but I’m now very confident that I’m going to be able to hit all the goals that I’ve set myself. I’m still not sure when I’m going to retire, but that little voice that I’ve ignored saying that I’m going to be working forever has now gone and I’m so much happier for it. I’m really glad that after years of thinking about it, I took the plunge into getting advice.