Whilst it’s good to have someone on your team (your financial adviser) who knows what’s happening in the markets, it’s not always helpful to relay all that information to you and have you make decisions about it. We can’t control the markets, but we can control our conversations about money. That’s why it’s not always helpful to ask what is happening in the markets; it’s more beneficial to ask what problems we can work on in […]
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Recognise. Interrupt. Change.
“We cannot change what we are not aware of, and once we are aware, we cannot help but change.” – Sheryl Sandberg The foundation of most of our ongoing frustrations can be traced back to our habits, and the challenge with habits is we often aren’t even aware of them. When the world went into COVID lockdown, there was an increased awareness of face-touching, hand-washing and social distancing. All of a sudden, we became aware that we […]
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Inflation & Interest Rates
Typically, inflation and interest rates are in an “inverse” relationship: When rates are low, inflation tends to rise. And when rates are high, inflation tends to fall. Moneyweb recently wrote “increasing the cost of credit will reduce the demand for it and therefore slow down the pace of ‘new money’ entering the economy via credit channels. This slowdown of funds entering the economy via credit channels will slow down the inflation rate as less money chases […]
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Ask yourself these questions BEFORE switching funds
As financial planning conversations deepen and explore more value, we find ourselves moving from the empirical to the emotional, from processes to perceptions and from products to people. It’s an enlightening journey that takes us away from numbers and allows us to reflect and reconstruct our future planning approach. But, it’s also extremely challenging as we find questions we can’t easily answer; but, that’s still healthier than having answers we can’t question! This point of reflection […]
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Re-train your brain for healthier relationships
At the heart of everything, we find relationships. Most of these are unintentional relationships that happen situationally, but some are relationships that stem from our choices. From the moment we enter the world, we will have a relationship with everyone and everything: from the space around us to the people who are present and how each made us feel. While these connections are as old as life, the Scientific Revolution sparked Newton’s insight in 1687. He […]
Continue readingMore TagThe secret to building wealth
The root of our wealth is not in our income or our spending; it’s in our behaviour. Our habits make us wealthy, not the markets. Some have said that sound financial management comes down to spending less than we earn – but whilst this adage holds merit, it’s a lot more complicated in practice. It’s complicated because people are complicated. It’s not helpful to tell someone who is already relying on credit to get through the […]
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Building your Money IQ… and EQ!
Would you consider yourself to be financially intelligent? Depending on how you answer that, here’s another tough question: how much do you trust yourself to manage your own finances? Often we find that after answering the second question, clients want to go back and reanswer the first! And, that’s okay. As Ken Honda suggests, there’s more than one type of financial intelligence, and we can work on both to be happy and prosperous. Honda, Japan’s no. […]
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Crypto can be taxing
One of the early appeals for cryptocurrencies was that they would not be taxed as they are not fiat currencies (yet), in that they are not owned by a country or used for trade inside of geographical tender regulations. However, as these platforms grow and develop, we are seeing that this is most likely not the case. According to several governments, cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, are classified as “intangible assets” – as opposed to, say, property […]
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Making mindfulness easier
Anything in life that is truly worth doing – is not easy. It is easy to forget this when we see others doing really well and making the difficult seem like a cinch. We don’t see all the hard work that goes into the background. But in our own areas of expertise, we have had to start from level zero and apply ourselves over time to gain the knowledge and experience akin to being proficient. When […]
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Ready to be more resilient?
We can’t change what happens to us, but we can change how we respond to what happens to us, and within us. Everything ages, but not everything ages well. Some things can wither from the inside out if they do not have a well-developed resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back and withstand stressors. It is to have the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. For us, resilience is something that we need to work […]
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