It’s easy to think about a financial plan and consider the elements that typically go into it. For instance, we could picture a plan that consists of a retirement savings product, life and health insurance, investment portfolios, and maybe a few things like trusts, wills and estate plans. Or, we could think about what a financial plan can help us avoid, and help us achieve. When we think of our financial plan in terms of the […]
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Remember why
“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls, and others build windmills.” Chinese Proverb Change and transformation can cause two reactions in us, either we will try to stop or resist the change, or we will see how we can use it for our advantage and growth. What’s certain is that what we are doing, and how we are doing it, will change. However, our motivation, our why, can remain the same. When we […]
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What’s changed in your life?
WHERE TRUE FINANCIAL PLANNING STARTS One of the best ways to make any constructive change or difference in the direction of our lives is to take a moment to observe what’s currently going on. Life whizzes by so quickly that if we don’t check in with ourselves, we will find it hard to observe and articulate what has changed. Financial planning, if done right, should start in the same place. Rather than beginning a financial planning […]
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Thank you, money
Some people say that magic isn’t real, but what about the first magic words we’re all taught to say? No – not “abracadabra” or “zimzalabim”, although those are great words. Abracadabra is thought to come from the Aramaic phrase “avra kehdabra”, meaning “I will create as I speak”, and zimzalabim comes from the mythological tricksters, Zim Zala and Bim. But, our most basic and formative levels of social etiquette (getting people to do what we want […]
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Social intelligence: beyond ourselves
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” African Proverb In 2006, just 11 years after his international phenomenon “Emotional Intelligence — Why it can matter more than IQ”, Daniel Goleman wrote “Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships”, a groundbreaking synthesis of the latest findings in biology and brain science. In this book, he unravels how we are “wired to connect” and the surprisingly profound impact […]
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Building your Money IQ… and EQ!
Would you consider yourself to be financially intelligent? Depending on how you answer that, here’s another tough question: how much do you trust yourself to manage your own finances? Often we find that after answering the second question, clients want to go back and reanswer the first! And, that’s okay. As Ken Honda suggests, there’s more than one type of financial intelligence, and we can work on both to be happy and prosperous. Honda, Japan’s no. […]
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Marketing yourself beyond 2022
In the next few years, we are likely to see a significant increase in small businesses, from home enterprises to startups. Many people have had to create sideline income or recover from losing their jobs in a shrinking job market. Jobs seeing the fastest decline are in production or administration support, primarily due to automation and digitisation of platforms and processes. With the meteoric growth of social media, personal marketing has become an attractive option for […]
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Driving manual or automatic
Some people love driving; others hate it. Some like to drive the car, whilst others prefer to be driven. Some go for a manual car, and others go for an automatic. Driving can be about experiencing the views, the silence, the confinement, the speed. But, it can also be about getting from one place to another as quickly and painlessly as possible. We all have different feelings about driving, and that’s most likely why there are […]
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Just one more
They say that getting old happens slowly, and then all at once. Most of the change around us occurs so gradually that we barely notice it; ageing, losing or gaining our fitness, losing or gaining weight, intimacy in relationships, and debt and investing. These are some of the areas of incrementally-unnoticeable change with which we’re most familiar. Often, our experience begins with gaining or losing “Just one more”. Just one more day before we arrange that […]
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Should meetings matter less?
In a recent LinkedIn post, our team read about a senior manager at one of our local banks who was raving about being able to work from home and qualified the statement with, “Of course, I’ve been in back-to-back meetings since 8am.” Somehow, it seems like society has created the perception that meetings equal productivity, but most of the time, they don’t. According to a quick Google search, many executives feel overwhelmed by meetings, and no […]
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