The World is not so bad

It only takes a few minutes of watching the news to get the feeling that the world is heading into a tailspin.

Endless images of natural disasters, car crashes, and Royal Commissions into the ethically bankrupt fill the airwaves on a daily basis. It’s upsetting – but also certainly captivating for the average viewer.

This article talks about the challenge and benefits of thinking like an optimist rather than a pessimist, and provides some real data on how the world continues to drastically improve in slow and incremental ways to demonstrate that optimists aren’t self-deluded after all (5 mins read).

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Brendon VadeAll, Living a Better Life
11 Sketches that Illustrate the Path to Financial Happiness

New York Times columnist, author and financial planner Carl Richards has been a long-time friend of Stewart Partners and made a career out of exposing and analysing what he calls the “behaviour gap” — the gap between what you should do with your money and what you actually do.

Richards has boiled down his wisdom on wealth and happiness into a dozen of his sketches that he’s allowed us to share with you. Please enjoy (2 mins read)

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Brendon VadeAll, Investment Education, Living a Better Life
A Formula for Success through Major Global Events

Investing is a long-term rewarding endeavour. Indeed, people will spend decades pursuing their financial goals. But being an investor can sometimes be complicated, challenging, frustrating, and sometimes frightening.

This article considers how our response to major events has a great impact on the outcomes we experience than the event itself, and how markets have responded to six major global events over the past 30 years (6 mins read).

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Brendon VadeAll, Investment Education, Living a Better Life
Your Digital Legacy

Once upon a time our lives were dominated by trips to the bank, the post office, call waiting and Kodak stores (remember the excitement of the 1 hour turnaround!).  However today, more of our lives and activity is spent online, with a resulting large digital footprint.

But what happens to our digital footprint if we lose mental capacity or die?   What will be your digital legacy and how will your loved ones deal with it?

With input from our legal panel of estate planning lawyers, this article considers how you should approach and plan for your digital legacy as part of your estate planning. (4 mins)

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Brendon VadeAll, Retirement and Estate Planning
The Journey of Owning Shares

Investing in shares can be a rollercoaster experience.  The equity markets are inherently volatile, but the reward is higher investment returns over time.  This article examines the evidence of what the journey of investing in shares looks like, and over what timeframes investors can reasonably expect to be rewarded for investing in equity markets.  (5 min read) 

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Brendon VadeAll, Investment Education
Volatility - 8 Simple Lessons

Renewed volatility in markets has awoken the media from its summertime slumber. News directors drag out dated file footage of frantic traders and summon talking head experts to explain to ‘mums and dads’ what it all means. Well, what does it mean? More importantly, does it matter?

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Brendon VadeAll, Investment Education
Why You Need a Financial Fire Drill

Ten years since the global financial crisis, global equity markets have climbed back to multi-year or record highs, causing memories of past market falls to fade. This makes it a perfect time, then, for investors and their advisers to revisit their financial fire drill for the inevitable return of market volatility somewhere in the future (6 mins) 

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Brendon VadeAll, Investment Education
Cyber Security

With many of our clients preparing to enjoy an end of year break, we’ve pulled together a checklist of Do’s and Don’ts that we believe will help you to protect your personal information.

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Brendon VadeAll, Cybersecurity
THE 2017 budget

With so much Superannuation Reform from last year’s budget still being worked through ahead of 1 July, unsurprisingly (and some might say thankfully) the 2017 Budget has little that impacts superannuation and retirement savings directly.

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Brendon VadeAll, Federal Budget Updates
Budget Review 2017

The government has released another ‘Exposure Draft’ Bill to test public reaction to the superannuation proposals they want to legislate. A short consultation period will ensue followed by a potentially arduous passage of the Bill through parliament before finally coming into law.

 

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Brendon VadeAll, Federal Budget Updates