Financial Autonomy

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR WEEKLY EMAIL "GAINING CHOICE" TO KEEP UP WITH ALL THINGS FINANCIAL AUTONOMY   If retirement is a decade or more away, it's tempting to look at your parents and perhaps grandparents in retirement and figure, well, they seem to be getting along fine, I'll just have what they're having. But there's two key factors that have underpinned your parents retirement, that will look vastly d...

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR WEEKLY EMAIL "GAINING CHOICE" TO KEEP UP WITH ALL THINGS FINANCIAL AUTONOMY   In the last post - How to start an Investment Portfolio - we looked at the steps and mechanics involved in creating your first investment portfolio. So we covered - setting your Objectives, determining how much Risk you will take on, your investment Time Frame, and Opening a share trading account.  This...

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR WEEKLY EMAIL "GAINING CHOICE" TO KEEP UP WITH ALL THINGS FINANCIAL AUTONOMY   This is the first of a two-part series. In this post we will explore what are the actual steps and mechanics involved in starting an investment portfolio? In the next post, I'll explore how you should go about building your portfolio. I've been building investment portfolios for clients for 20 odd years...

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR WEEKLY EMAIL "GAINING CHOICE" TO KEEP UP WITH ALL THINGS FINANCIAL AUTONOMY   We are joined today by Shaun Farrugia from Optimised Accounting and Finance to talk about the essential things you need when you move to self-employment. In this episode we cover the challenges and knowledge Shaun shares about being self-employed: Getting the clarity of knowing why you need to move to se...

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR WEEKLY EMAIL "GAINING CHOICE" TO KEEP UP WITH ALL THINGS FINANCIAL AUTONOMY One of the best ways to gain choice in life is to become self-employed, and a great way to bring that aspiration to life is by trying your hand at a Side Hustle. For the uninitiated, a Side Hustle is a business that you create as a second income to your primary source of making a living. It can be used to...

Episode 75 – When investing, focus on what really matters SUBSCRIBE TO OUR WEEKLY EMAIL "GAINING CHOICE" TO KEEP UP WITH ALL THINGS FINANCIAL AUTONOMY I remember reading once the advice of someone who had achieved success in their field. Their key observation was, "in life, you will occasionally be faced with times where you have to make a choice. One path will be easy, and the other harder. I've...

Episode 74 – How to get your partner engaged in your Financial Autonomy goal SUBSCRIBE TO OUR WEEKLY EMAIL "GAINING CHOICE" TO KEEP UP WITH ALL THINGS FINANCIAL AUTONOMY A significant reason many people don't achieve Financial Autonomy is because they get pigeonholed into a certain life. They define themselves in certain ways, and often this flows from the role they've developed in their marriage...

Episode 73 -  The pay yourself first strategy Have trouble building up a nest egg? Struggling to build up enough cash to start investing? Hate the idea of a detailed budget? If you answered yes to an y of these questions, then the Pay Yourself First strategy could be for you . The idea of Pay Yourself First is not new – Google tells me the term was first used all the way back in the 1920's by an A...

Episode 72 - Net Worth – how and why Remember back in your school days where every few weeks you'd have a test, then at the end of the year there would be an exam. I have kids in high school now and I can tell you the framework hasn't changed. So why all this measurement? It's all about assessing progress . If you get a test result back and it's 8/20, you know you've got to pull your finger out be...

Episode 71 – From fashion to true crime with Anna Priestland Anna Priestland joins us in this episode and tells us her story about how she achieved choice and flexibility in her career while building a young family. She shares how she has made these career choices work in her life. The experiences and knowledge Anna shares in this episode: An interesting walkthrough of her working life starting fr...

Episode 70 – Financial Anxiety - is it holding you back? I've spoken in past episodes about the potential for overwhelm to lead to procrastination. Procrastination is evil because it results in no progress. You're stuck in the cement. But there's another element to the no-progress problem, and that is financial anxiety or financial stress. If you've never worried about money in your life, I'd say...

Episode 69 – Money can't buy happiness ... or can it? In his thought provoking book The Geometry of Wealth, author Brian Portnoy observes "Does money buy happiness? The answer to that question can be summarised as Yes, Not really, It depends" . Intuitively none of us like ambiguous answers like this, but here, it successfully illustrates the complexity inherent in the question. After all, what is...

Episode 68 – Financial Fundamentals – the 6 essential foundation stones for financial success SUBSCRIBE TO OUR WEEKLY EMAIL "GAINING CHOICE" TO KEEP UP WITH ALL THINGS FINANCIAL AUTONOMY Today's episode flows from a meeting I had last week with one of you guys , a member of the Financial Autonomy community. For reasons of privacy, of course I won't use her real name, so let's call her Jenny. It wa...

Episode 67 – Trent Taylor and the 3 33 333 plan - work 3 days per week, 33 weeks per year, and earn $333k In this episode, we learn from Trent's interesting story from being a pilot to building his business to gain choice and improve his family life. In this interview we cover: His journey and transition from being a commercial pilot to changing his lifestyle by acquiring a franchise and then buil...

Episode 66 – The reality of negative returns - knowledge is power Investment markets don't always go up . In fact they go down on a pretty regular basis. Is that a shock to you? I suspect not. Yet virtually none of the commentary on investing talks about negative returns – markets going down. But when I speak with clients, especially new clients, usually somewhere in their top 3 issues is not want...

Episode 65 – The challenges of investing for children With the cost of housing continuing to climb, in addition to the rising cost of tertiary education, many parents and grandparents are worried about what the future holds for the young people in their lives. Last week Michael contacted me. He has a young daughter and was thinking of starting an investment for her, where he'd perhaps tip in $25 p...

Episode 64 – Money & happiness - Brian Portnoy - The Geometry of Wealth I am joined by author Brian Portnoy in this episode as we talk about his book on money and happiness called The Geometry of Wealth. In this interview we cover: W hat is "The Geometry of Wealth" about and what led and triggered him to write it. An elaboration of "Adaptive Simplicity". The 4 C's of the happiness element and how...

Episode 63 – Why do investment markets have bubbles? If you've ever seen a graph of any share market, you will know that whilst over the long term it tends to go up, the graph isn't a straight line. Markets will go up, up, up over several years, only to fall back for a year or two, before re-starting their upward climb. Research on United States investors shows that whilst over 20 years to the end...

Episode 62 – Putting the puzzle together – 4 essential elements to achieving your big life goals Here at Financial Autonomy, our focus is typically on the money side of how you achieve your goals and gain the choice in life that you deserve. But of course, achieving big goals requires more than just a financial solution . And so in today's post we're going to take a step back and consider things a...

Episode 61 – Have your 20's set you up for financial failure? Habits. Human brains love them! Any time we can go on auto-pilot, we jump at it. Author Samuel Johnson observed, "The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken" . I also like a quote from Agatha Christie on the subject "Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them" . In your fin...

I interview tax specialist Shaun Farrugia to explore the use of trusts in maximising your wealth.    

Often associated with a sense of overwhelm, we look at how you can push through a procrastination barrier.

In this interview with Adam Murray of the hugely popular Subtle Disruptors podcast, hear how a personal crisis lead him to reinvent his life and in the process, gain choice and control.

Episode 60 – Mike Lewis - When to Jump Today in the episode, we interview the author of When To Jump, Mike Lewis. The book is about career change or starting your own business. In this interview we cover: M ike's jump to being a professional sportsman His job and career before he became a sportsman Events that unfolded and didn't go to plan when he left his career Framework: Jump Curves - 4 phases...