At myFinancialAdvisor, our mission is to provide appropriately tailored advice that optimises our clients’ long-term financial outcomes. We achieve this by applying intellectual rigour, attention to detail, and high service levels to each client’s evolving long-term financial requirements. We combine this with an emphasis upon efficiency in the day-to-day management of each client’s financial affairs, particularly with respect to the bureaucracy inherent in governments and large institutions.
Individual Clients
Investment Portfolios
myFinancialAdvisor serves individuals with either significant investment assets or significant annual incomes who are seeking a better solution to the structuring and management of their financial assets. We offer an advisory service that seeks to generate substantive improvements in financial performance, clarity and simplicity.
Superannuation & Retirement
We will prepare a comprehensive Financial Report called a Statement of Advice, that details our recommended strategies for realising your future financial objectives through to retirement and beyond. Within this report, the key areas of consideration are:
- the legal structure of your investment entities, particularly your superannuation fund, which remains one of the most tax-effective vehicles for creating retirement wealth,
- asset allocation and choice of specific investments,
- personal insurance protection, and
- succession issues such as Wills and Powers of Attorney
Critically, we also monitor our recommendations on an ongoing monthly basis to ensure that the implemented strategies are always in alignment with the Reports’s projected long-term financial performance. If we believe – or you request – that changes or modifications are necessary to your existing strategies, we will act very quickly to realign your current structure to the required position.
Case Study
Our Analysis
A prospective client was seeking a better solution to the management of his own personal superannuation fund. Our analysis of his existing arrangements revealed:
- a financial planner providing investment advice. The planner had constructed a portfolio of many different investment products – including cash, fixed income, shares and managed funds – which were traded heavily. Overall, the shares and managed funds had performed poorly on both an absolute and relative basis. As a result, the fund had lost value over the previous five years, despite receiving sizable contributions on an annual basis. The planner was invoicing his client a monthly fee for service, as well as receiving payments from stockbrokers for share sales and upfront and ongoing payments from investment institutions with whom he had placed funds.
- an accountant providing administration services. The accountant was invoicing the client a significant annual amount for the required ongoing administration, as well as charging substantial additional fees for one-off items. We discovered that a previous administrative error would result in the client being subject to a penalty assessment from the Australian Taxation Office.
- a life insurance company providing reporting services. The accountant had engaged an insurance company’s reporting service to provide quarterly Valuation, Income & Expense, Transaction and Capital Gains Statements. The client had difficulty understanding these statements and was usually kept waiting several months after balance date before receiving them.
- a separate personal superannuation account held with a financial institution. A personal superannuation account was established with an institution in addition to the client’s existing personal superannuation fund. This resulted in additional administrative costs without providing any apparent benefits.
Our Solution
We recommended and implemented the following strategy:
- close the client’s institutional superannuation account and consolidate all his benefits into his existing personal superannuation fund. This resulted in a simpler superannuation structure that provided the client with greater investment choice – and thereby improved performance prospects – as well as lower costs through the avoidance of duplicate administration fees.
rationalise the portfolio into cash, an Australian Equity Fund and an International Equity Fund. Our objective is to maximise long-term investment performance within the client’s appropriate risk level. We recommend funds solely on the basis of our own proprietary research, and actively monitor the performance of recommended funds against our established benchmarks. We believe that a small number of the best performing funds held over the long-term will provide the best results at a given risk level. We avoid short-term trading within the portfolio as we believe that our selected fund managers are closer to the market on a day-to-day basis and are consequently better placed to make these decisions. Transaction costs and capital gains taxes are two other significant factors that influence our bias against short-term trading. - appoint a specialist firm of personal superannuation fund administrators that provide a high quality service at a significantly lower cost.
- establish the client’s personal account within our own Portfolio Administration Service (PAS). The PAS provides the client with internet-based access to a comprehensive set of informative and easily-understood financial reports. This service is provided by myFinancialAdvisor at no additional cost to the client.
Corporate Clients
Employee Incentive Plans
As an incentive to key employees, employer contributions to superannuation are subject to the following limitations:
- contribution amounts that exceed the mandated age-based limits lose their tax-effectiveness, and
- superannuation benefits are usually not available to the employee until retirement.
Consequently, many corporations seek to establish incentive programs that provide substantive long-term rewards that will fully vest to the employee upon the achievement of long-term performance benchmarks. While employee share schemes are widely used for this purpose, they can present material taxation issues, and, within tightly held companies, may jeopardize the continuing control of existing owners.
We will prepare an analysis of your Corporation’s existing employee incentives and will make recommendations for the establishment of an Incentive Plan that:
- clearly connects the employees’ long-term benefits with achievement of the employer’s desired level of long-term performance, and
- operates efficiently on a taxation, administration and cost basis.
Investment Portfolios
Upon assessment or your corporation’s long-term financial requirements, we will design and construct an investment portfolio that seeks to maximize long-term performance at the appropriate level of risk. Critically, we also monitor our recommendations on an ongoing monthly basis to ensure that the portfolio’s long term performance is always in alignment with your corporation’s long-term financial requirements.
Superannuation
The provision of superannuation benefits is an important issue for all Corporate Employers. By legal design, such benefits have become a material percentage of the Corporate Employee’s total compensation package and, if invested successfully, an increasingly significant component of their net worth.
We will prepare our own analysis of your Corporation’s existing superannuation arrangements and will make recommendations that seek to improve the following areas for all members:
- long-term investment performance,
- insurance coverage,
- administrative efficiency,
- understanding of legal and other technical issues, and
- total cost of membership.
Our internet-based Portfolio Administration Service (PAS) provides in-depth daily reports such as Portfolio Valuation and Portfolio Performance to all authorised personnel.
Case Study
Our Initial Recommendations
We were specifically engaged by an ongoing client as investment advisors to an established self managed corporate superannuation fund. All members were invested into a single portfolio that was comprised of a large number of Australian shares, as well as Fixed Interest and Australian Equity Funds. We recommended and implemented the following initiatives:
- creation of three separate portfolios – low, medium and high growth – to give members a choice that best suited their individual risk profile, and
- rationalisation of the number and selection of investments in order to optimize the performance of the three portfolios for their mandated level of risk.
Our Initial Advisory Role
As a result of the growth in the size and membership of the Fund over the ensuing three years, we were requested by senior management to research and implement the Fund’s transition from a self-managed to an institutionally managed structure. Based upon our own research, we recommended and implemented an institutional superannuation structure that best suited the client within the key areas of investment choice, insurance coverage, administrative service and overall cost.
Upon completion of the transition to an institutional structure, we implemented the following initiatives:
- create a secure and seperately-dedicated section of our website that provides all fund members with our quarterly recommendations for determining their own risk profile, asset allocation and investment fund selection. A short, medium and long term performance history of our recommendations is also provided quarterly, as well as a performance comparison of our recommendations against the in-house institutional fund offerings. Our long-term recommended asset allocations and investment funds have significantly outperformed the in-house Institutional Funds.
- provide annual educational presentations to all of the client’s offices throughout Australia.
- regularly review – and where necessary report to the Policy Committee – the behaviour of the Superannuation Fund’s Trustees and Management to ensure that members’ interests are not compromised by the institution’s self-interest.
Online Access
We have developed our own financial tools to assist you in planning for your financial future. Please click here:
We have also developed our own reporting application which provides relevant and up to date information regarding your financial portfolio’s historical performance and current position. To view a sample of our online capability, please click here: