Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the Empower Wealth Team!

Hi everyone and Merry Christmas to all! In this year’s 2019 Christmas message, I wanted to focus on a theme around financial peace. I mean, the year has been challenging for some —a bit of economic uncertainty, a bit of job uncertainty — but the bright spot in the second half of the year has definitely been the property market. And that hopefully bodes well to the wealth effect and what 2020 will bring for each of us and also, broadly the economy as a whole. Because when the economy’s going well, hopefully all of us have the opportunity to create greater wealth.

Now, financial peace is a theme in our business, which really has two main components. The first component is really around money management — and that’s about having a strategy and a system to organise and control your money so you can track more surplus.

And, of course, in our business we call that our Money SMARTS system. And we have obviously a bestselling book that educates people in regards to that.

The other part of how you achieve financial peace is also aligning your money management and basically putting that money to work. And in our case that is a Plan. So, making sure you can work out and articulate a set of goals. Now those goals should be about personal goals first and then the financial money to achieve those personal goals because that’s the connection that you need to make.

Because just having money isn’t necessarily going to make you happier. It’s connecting these two experiences and the things that you want to do, and the memories that you can create, which will basically mean you’ll have a fulfilling life.

So, in terms of the planning side, what we really focus on is a couple of things — and that is getting those goals set, but also when it comes to the execution of that, it’s over a longer, sustained period of time. There’s no interest in no success in trying to race to a finish line and speculate and lose all your money. Investing for the long term is very much in our DNA and it’s always about two things…. it’s about the time you have available and then ultimately the income or benefit that you’re going to drive out of those investments to create wealth.

 

Every year I like to also talk about some of our stats and so let’s do that now. Oh, and the glasses aren’t a prop… they are real. I’m not one who can read very well without them these days!

So last year we set ourselves a goal where we wanted to help 10,000 aspiring property investors to put them on their pathway to financial peace. Now I can report to you that as we’re going to air right now, this year we’ve helped 5,369 households and individuals create that journey. Now that’s 1,230 new households we’ve been able to help in the last 12 months. Now, again, we want 10,000 by the end of 2022. So that’s obviously a big, audacious goal for us to be able to help those households.

The pleasing part about that is our MyWealth Portal now has over 15,300 people who have registered to use our free portal. So it’s available for everyone to use, it incorporates the money management system — our Money SMARTS system — to help you organise and control your money. And so it’s exciting to see that people are exploring ways in which they can better manage their money, trap more surplus, and then ultimately put that to work.

 

Here’s a few of the milestones that I wanted to share with you….

If we look at our property story and our Buyers Agents area, over the course of this 12 month period mwe hit a certain milestone where we bought our 1000th investment property! So that is very, very cool and a great result for our team here. In the year alone, we bought 278 properties. We scan thousands of properties every year to try and find those rough diamonds and those bits of gold. And we also missed — or we bid for — 108 properties, which we missed out on. This also tells us that we’re not necessarily just going to buy anything at any price. So that’s our property side.

In terms of our Property Wealth Planning — remember we’re always about “Planning become what you plan to become” — we’ve done 1500 property or portfolio plans over the course of the last eight to nine years. So that’s fantastic! And those numbers are increasing. Just to give you an idea, in the last 12 months we’ve delivered 491 property or portfolio plans. We’ve recommended 1,135 investment or owner occupied purchases inside those plans… and that correlates to recommendations of $565 million worth of property. The other big milestone in terms of those 1500 Plans is we’ve recommended over $2 billion worth of property to build that up. So that’s a great result for those people who understand what financial peace is in terms of “Planning to become…” and putting that into action.

If we turn to Mortgage Broking, we’ve got $750 million of mortgages that we help our clients manage. And this year alone that number will increase by around $350 million, in terms of new settled loans to help those clients on their journey.

In terms of our Financial Planning business we manage, in terms of investments and funds under management… around $115 million of our client’s superannuation and managed funds investments. And also a really pleasing part of our defence strategy is that there’s another 209 individuals who have taken up personal insurances such as income protection, life trauma, TPD — those total and permanent disability insurances — to help protect the asset base that they’re building.

 

So it has been a very, very busy year! In looking at some of the rewards and awards that the great team of people we’ve got here at Empower Wealth have been able to achieve. For the second year in a row, we won the Property Investment Advisory Firm Of The Year from Your Investment Property Magazine. So that’s a great news story for us.

We also won the Brokerage Of The Year (6 – 12 staff) at the Australian Mortgage Awards. We are a Top 10 Brokerage in Australia — coming in at #7 —through the MPI magazine, which is Mortgage Professional Australia. And then the Better Business Awards…. We were winner of Best Customer Service — and I think we’ve now won that four times. In terms of those awards, that’s really great.

 

To finish off my message here today, I really also wanted to focus in on bit of gift giving with some a special gift for you…

So Christmas is a time of giving. And so from our point of view, that’s exactly what we want to do with our bestselling book, The Armchair Guide to Property Investing. So we’ve bought quite a few copies of this book, but they’re now available for FREE. We’ve paid for them. We bought them from the publisher. So if you want to get access to this book, all you need to do is just pay the postage. And so we’ll buy the book — usually retailing around $30 a book — and we will send it out to you as a Christmas/New Year gift. Because inside here is all the frameworks that we talk about with our clients. It’s all the processes and systems and proven formulas that we use to get our clients over the line. So my gift to you is the book is free. All you need to do is pick up the postage and handling and we’ll get that out to you as part of our Christmas message for you.

So, for those of you who are thinking about the New Year and looking to celebrate, take a moment to smell the roses over Christmas. It’s always really important to recharge or re-energise and then, coming into the New Year, it’s also then about what message are you going to tell yourself? What message is going to be something that stimulates you, in terms of someone who does take action. Because remember, Knowledge is empowering, but only if you do act on it.

So Merry Christmas from the entire team here at Empower Wealth — from both our Sydney and also our Melbourne people — and we wish you a very, very prosperous and Happy New Year for you and your family.

Thanks for watching.

 

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