Plannng for retirement

As a financial advisor for my brief tenure in South East Asia selling’ off the shelf’ Investment portfolios to expats the one thing I did learn out of this industry is the never ending vortex of people swirly blindly into oblivion day by day.

The thing with being an expat financial advisor which really is a very loose term for what we were, we were more’ Independent but trained on just a few packages salesmen’ really. Yet in my 18 months stint I believe I gave the best advice to the people I did meet and hold my head up high when I am out and about.

They say that nothing is a mistake in life and we learn from everything we do. My 4 years in a butchers shop after school gave me excellent mental arithmetic skills, I learned teamwork and how to kill people properly in the Army, selling Vacuum cleaners to the public taught me a lot about sales, and as a financial advisor what I learned was to create a residual income for myself in any which way I could through having my own business.

It does not take long for even the slowest learner like me to realise after asking people each day as an IFA:  If you were to retire tomorrow how much money would you need to live off. This leads to a thought process where people start to evaluate what is a life? Am I having what’s called a life?

Get a life we are told, to me and this is a very personal thing but a life the way I see it means choices, choices to be where you want to be each day, and not where a boss wants you to be.

The vast majority of people when asked about retirement say they want to live on the same money as they earn now when they retire, I would always mentor them and ask well if you had no job to get up to go to, what are you going to do? They would come up with a plethora of ideas of things they always wanted to do, travel, learn new skills languages, music etc.  Yet they soon started to realise through mentorship, that what they earn now, would not fund that lifestyle.

The money people earn now seems ok because their day is taken up with working so they are diverted from hobbies and fun things that cost money, so the point is most people could not have’ a good life’ retiring on what income they live of now.

The really frightening part is most people are heading towards real poverty blindly! I have a real simple Power point to show you how the average person needs to wake up and sort out some kind of future for themselves. The names and places have been changed to protect the flirtatious however it is based upon a real case scenario: