For the past three weeks I have been on a quest to find the answers to 'what now' and 'where to next'. This past week was the wrap up of that journey and so I saw no better way than to have my personal financial advisor address us for a little over 45min.                 

I started out by going into what I consider fundamental principles to having a fulfilling journey in life, a journey of contentment and strategic planning. For more details click here. I'll summarise it for you nonetheless;

1. Always start with the 'why'- never use money as an escape, don't plan because you're fearful; of something (poverty maybe), don't use wealth as a way to to mask unresolved past issues and finally, don't use it as a source of identity. 
2. now build a life plan.
3. Base it on your life purpose (what is your life purpose) - Why do you do what you do? What are you here? What wakes you up in the mornings and gives you the drive, the thing that makes you want to keep going on with life? Purpose is in there - not in money.  
4. Divide yourself into roles- see yourself as a company - each department must work harmoniously with others for the effectiveness of the entire system combined.
5. Visualise - use pictures and imagery to remind yourself of where you are headed. Regularly come back to these pictures and remind yourself how you're doing- celebrate the little strides in the right direction- realign if you're missing the mark. "the power of visualisation is that it leads to high performance which then leads to high achievement. when you are often reminded (visually) of your goals it helps with your intentions as well." - Katleho Mohono. 
6. Set practical goals with realistic timelines - a dream without a timeline is exactly that, a dream. 
7. Allow yourself to make mistakes if you must, but learn rom those who have gone ahead of you so you can avoid those that are avoidable. 
8. Surround yourself with people going in the same direction - believable people, CREDIBLE people.

So that made the first half of our conversation!

Troy took over and spoke about how most people are frightened by “finance” and assume because you think you don’t understand it, it’s too complicated or daunting to deal with. A role of a financial advisor like himself is to share the importance of: 

• understanding our own personal circumstances. no two people will deal with the same financial situation. 
• understanding the risks, which are categorised into: 
  • death 
  • loss of income (such as a global crisis like the one we’re in) 
  • terminal illness 

Most people are reluctant to deal with these risk factors, I suppose social conditioning has also put up a barrier about these things. In some cultures talking about death is a “taboo”. 

Life insurance 

An example Troy spoke about was if you are married and have two different incomes of different levels, there are many misconceptions about getting life insurance/cover. the main reasons for getting life cover is so that your children and spouse are not left in the dark with a whole lot of debt should you pass away, and secondly it is to ensure a certain standard of living can be maintained if the spouse with lesser income is left behind. 

Income protection 

This is another area that is often misunderstood. The formal definition is that income protection pays out regular (tax free) replacement salary if you are medically unfit to do your job. It allows you to pay your mortgage as well as your daily cost of living. Often if you are working for a larger corporate company they would possibly already have somewhat of a “group scheme” available. However, if you are self employed or an entrepreneur you would have to purchase your own. 

Savings 

We can break this into “Immediate”, “Short term”, “medium term” and “long term” (retirement savings). 

Ultimately, we want to always have available immediate savings that equates six months of your monthly salary, which we call “emergency savings” for potential periods of times like the one we are currently in. How we can do this is by systematically and monthly putting money aside to build up six months of “reserves”. 

In answering the question where do we put our money “right now”, we have to think once again about catering for our own risk. Very often people view it as I will either put my money “here” or “there”, i.e. either save some aside for reserves or purchase income protection. However, it  doesn’t have to be that way, it is still possible to split it up and have them both work for you. Ultimately this is all very individual. Creating our own investment portfolios is a personal journey.

Thanks to the gang that hung out with us for these past four conversations. I hope it was helpful to all of you who joined. I look forward to the next set of conversations I will host about I don't know what. I am also grateful for Marissa, my lovely girlfriend, for helping me put this article together and for supporting our last conversation. 

Till next time, spend wisely.

 X Marissa Meer.