Welcome to Manifestation, Motivation and Passion. If you're looking to transform your life,
this is the podcast for you. It's all about improving yourself on the inside to see transformation
on the outside. I look at how to find and improve motivation and manifest lasting changes.
Thank you so much for joining me today. Today I've got Jacqui Ashby from Ascend Financial
Freedom who has been in finance for 20 years as business owner, mortgage broker and financial
and mindset mentor coaching. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jacqui.
My pleasure. Thank you for having me. No problem at all. Can you please explain
how you got started and why helping empower other women is so important to you?
Well, I've been in finance for over 20 years. I started as a mortgage broker and I was just
finding that a lot of my clients needed a lot more help when it came to their finances.
A lot of people wanted to do a little bit more. They wanted to invest and wanted to
know how to invest and those sorts of things. But I was finding if I was referring people
out to financial advisors, they actually weren't proceeding with them or they weren't going
ahead with anything. They kind of pushed me into becoming a financial advisor myself.
I was one of the first dual qualified finance brokers and financial advisors or financial
planners in Perth. As a financial advisor, I was coming across people that really didn't
know a lot about finances and I found that there was a real gap in the market for the
financial understanding. We've got financial counselors at one end that pretty much rescue
people and there's financial advisors at the other end that generally deal with people
that have got a lot of money to invest but there's nothing in between people that didn't
quite have a stack of money to invest but really wanted to do things a little bit better.
So I became a financial coach to be able to help people understand the fundamentals of
money stuff. I guess that the passion for it or the main thing behind it was I personally
have come from a domestic violence situation and over my 20 years, just understanding of
the stuff that people don't understand for one but for two, also understanding that a
lot of people stay in toxic relationships because of lack of financial understanding
or financial literacy or knowing what to do to help themselves to be able to get out of
these toxic relationships. So that's really where the financial coaching side of the business
has come to fruition is to really just help people understand the basics and the fundamentals
of all that grown up finance stuff that we should have been taught in school that's really,
really lacking. I believe that they're changing that now but it doesn't help us, you know,
us 30, 40s plus that didn't get that training in school. So yeah, that's why I do what I
do.
Firstly, I'm so sorry that you went through that but how amazing that you've been able
to turn it around to help other people and you've kind of led into my next question.
So I was going to say, can you tell me a bit more about your business? So I understand
you also do so financial coaching but also mindset mentoring as well?
Yeah, yeah. So look, we still do mortgages. So I still do finance. I still help people
get finance to achieve their goals from the perspective of buying cars and homes and those
sorts of things. The financial coaching really is finance 101. So it's teaching people just
stuff that you need to know and doing things in the right order to be a grown up when it
comes to your finance stuff. But I found that whilst knowing and understanding all the facts
and figures and all that sort of stuff, knowing it didn't necessarily equate to doing. And
I found that there's a lot of people there with some mental blocks in place and traumas
and bad mentors or guides, parents, any sort of past issues that has actually stopped people
from being successful. So I upskilled. I do hypnotherapy and your linguistic programming
and a whole range of different techniques just to help people overcome any of those
mental blocks or issues or problems that they have that are holding them back from being
financially successful. So it could be something as simple as even somebody that's a smoker,
you wouldn't think smoking is a financial thing or something that a financial services
company would provide assistance for but look, anybody that's a smoker understands how much
money they put towards cigarettes. So if somebody is really wanting to get ahead with their
finances and willing to give up smoking, let's say, but don't know how to go about it, I
can help with that. I can assist with that. There's a whole different other range of things,
but it's really just getting into your mindset and making sure that you're set up mentally
to be able to actually succeed. So having all the knowledge through the financial coaching
is great, but also just taking that extra step, that touchy feely step of actually just
getting your head right.
And NLP is such a powerful tool. Now I went to your finance seminar, which is how we met
and I was absolutely blown away at the amount that you need to retire. So can you tell us
a little bit more about that?
Yeah, sure. Look, it depends. There's a couple of ways to calculate it and without going
into, you know, I've got my fingers in the air doing inverted commas, I'm not providing
financial advice per se, but there's a couple of really basic calculations that you can
do and I'll go through them step by step and hopefully this comes out clear and easy. But
if you picked an income that you want to live on in retirement or when you choose to start
working, retirement tends to scare people when I say that word. So let's just say when
you choose to start working. If you pick a number, so whether it's $50,000 or $40,000
or even $100,000, we pop that into a calculator and then you divide it by the amount that
you believe you will get in as a return. So let's say if you were to put your money into
a bank account, the return you would get from a bank account these days is like if you get
$50,000 divided by 2%, so if you do that $50,000 divided by 2%, it will give you a ridiculously
high figure. Now, if you, I don't have the calculator in front of me, I should have prepared
it earlier, but if you put in those figures. So what did you say? $50,000 divided by 2%,
I think it should come out at a million or something. $2.5 million. $2.5 million. Okay.
So that's the sort of nest egg that you would need to have if you wanted to just live off
the interest if you had that much money sitting in a bank account earning your 2%. So that's
if you want to leave $2.5 million for your estate, for your kids, future generations
and those sorts of things. That's if you want to do that. If you wanted to maybe invest
in something that had a bit of a higher return, let's say a 5% return, if you do that $50,000
again divided by 5%. $50,000 divided by 5% is $1 million. There you go. So there's only
a million dollars that you would need to have. However, let's say if you put your money into
shares or, you know, I won't say, we can say cryptocurrency, that's kind of up and down
by 50% a day or 100% or something per day, but let's just go 10%. So if you have $50,000
divided by 10% then you're looking at $500,000. $500,000. So for people that are very, very,
very nervous investors that want to have the world, let's say, they would need to be in
a position to have a massive nest egg to be able to get that return or to get that $50,000
a year as income. If you're willing to take a little bit of a risk or go for an investment
that has a slightly better return, well then the amount of money that you need to actually
have as a nest egg reduces. So what I teach people about is understanding risk and return
and sometimes taking, you know, risk is not a dirty word. Risk is essential. But it's
what you can take on and be able to still sleep at night. So for example, putting money
in a bank account is a massive risk. It's a massive risk in the sense that if you want
to be earning your $50,000 a year, you may not necessarily, while you're building up
that nest egg, you may not necessarily get up to that $2.5 million by the time you retire.
So it's all about learning risk and just learning pros and cons of yes, it is, you know, in
inverted commas safe but you may not necessarily get the money that you need by the time that
you need it. And again, this all pertains to if you wanted to leave a nest egg for your
family and just pull off the interest or the earnings of the asset that you've got.
But I think the key thing that you said in there was, you know, learned risk. Like it's
education and the more that you're educated, the less risk is involved.
Yep, definitely. I found that when I was working, being a mortgage broker, people were coming
to me saying, okay, I bought my house, now I need to go and buy an investment property
because that's what you do, isn't it? And a lot of people just went out and bought property
and bought property and didn't really understand that if poop hit the fan, they couldn't just
sell a bedroom to get $40,000 out. So things like risk and diversification and just understanding
stuff gives you a better chance to make better choices for yourself. Yeah, to put the safety
nets in place that you need as well.
So then how do you tell good risk from bad risk?
Well, like I've just said, a bank account, look at a bank account, there's good risk
and there's bad risk. A bank account can be seen as good and it can be seen as bad. But
it really depends on where you are at your life stage and it depends on what your goals
are. If you have high, high goals and aspirations over a short timeframe, well, then you need
to take on higher risk potentially, something that has a better return and usually something
that has a better return will generally have a lot more volatility and will be seen as
a lot riskier. So there's no such thing as a definite bad risk and there's no such thing
as a definite good risk. It's just what you need or what you don't need in your particular
life stage and what your goals are.
Okay, so if you don't want to wait until you're 65 or let's say 100, if the government keep
lifting the age limit, what are some good alternatives so that we can, and I use the
word loosely, but retire or do what we want to do rather than working hard to work?
Choose not to work. Yeah. Look, there's so many different things. I guess if you want
the ability to have that choice before the government retirement age, now I know I'm
going to rub some people up the wrong way, but I wouldn't be putting money into super.
Super is a fantastic, fantastic vehicle from a tax perspective. However, if you want to
retire early, you need access to your funds early. So diversifying and having funds outside,
there's a whole raft of different things that we talk about in the investment classes
that we do, but things like possibly shares, direct shares, ETFs, managed funds, investment
bonds. Investment bonds is something that not a lot of people talk about, but that also
has some fantastic tax benefits for you as well. For example, if you invested in a bond
for more than 10 years, there's absolutely no capital gains tax for any of the money
that you pull out after 10 years and you don't need to disclose any income or any earnings,
I should say, in an investment bond on your tax return until such a point that you actually
do withdraw any funds. So there's a whole raft of different asset classes, different
vehicles as well. If you want to go down home and it's not going to keep you awake at night,
there's cryptocurrency and a variety of different forex trading platforms that you could be
involved in as well. They tend to be quite high return, again, high risk.
Just jumping back a step, what are investment bonds?
Investment bonds are basically very similar to a managed fund. Well, they are pretty much
a managed fund. They're very similar to super as well. The underlying assets that you have
in them are shares. So it's almost like different baskets of shares that have different risk
gradings to them. So you'll have conservative, moderate growth, high growth, aggressive,
those sorts of things. Similar to your super. And what you do is you can either start with
a lump sum and leave it there for as long as you want. A better way is to start with
an amount and have a regular savings plan into it. And basically what it does is the
money that you put in there is attributed to the different underlying assets that you've
purchased in there. So like a managed fund, the shares in that. Each year you have the
ability to put up to an extra 125% into the investment bond and you can take your money
out at any time. So unlike super, it's invested similarly to super, but you actually get access
to the funds whenever you want. There are tax implications. The earlier you pull your
money out, the higher the tax you get charged. But the longer you leave it in there, the
less tax you get charged on the gains that you have in there. So it's really good.
Oh, sorry. If you were looking at investment bonds, what would be sort of the minimum amount
that people can start investing with?
I believe a couple of years ago it was $2,000 minimum.
That's quite reasonable.
But I believe, yeah, I believe they're now down to 500 is the minimum that you can start
with. But there's a whole lot of, if people only have small amounts to invest, which is
the people that I work with, survivors of domestic violence and those sorts of things,
they've only got a few dollars a week or maybe $50 a month or something like that. There's
all different things. There's Spaceship, there's Zambu, there's smaller micro share trading,
micro meaning small obviously, where you don't need to be paying large trading fees to be
able to buy into big portfolios. You can just go in there with your $10 a week or something
like that and actually go in and start getting that money working for you, better than trying
to scrimp and save into a savings account or your kids savings account or something
to earn that 1% per year. You could be putting into a smaller share, a micro share portfolio
to get your 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10% returns, those sorts of things.
Wow.
Yeah. There's even Zambu is where you can invest in not only cryptocurrency, but you
can invest in gold and silver as well. So there's a whole raft of different things
that you can be doing with small amounts of money, but also things that you could be doing
that can increase your ability to get extra income or an extra income stream or to speed
up the process of building your asset base or building your capital prior to retirement
should you want to retire earlier than whatever the government dictates.
That sounds like a good plan. Now I ran into someone today who I was telling about the
finance seminar that I went to and they were wanting to know when your next one is.
Sure. If you go to the Facebook page, Ascend Financial Freedom, that's A-S-C-E-N-D. We
do put our events up. We don't have one listed just yet. We are just a little bit cautious
with having to cancel, to book and cancel with COVID chopping and changing. So we are
looking at getting, doing them online, but if you keep an eye on the Facebook page, like
our page, and you'll be updated when we do have those workshops coming up. So we're
looking at doing a full day master class which covers the whole gamut of financial coaching
and we are also looking at breaking it down to smaller intervals because when you're
talking finance, sometimes it's a little bit hard to absorb over such a long timeframe.
Absolutely.
So yeah, we'll give that option for people to choose whether or not they can sit through
the whole thing and get their shoes sorted in one day or just come to the shorter sessions
as well. We also have a 60 days to success program where you get to work one on one with
me just to get, and I use the term, shoes, to get your shoes sorted or your grown up
finances, everything that we need to have.
Yes, absolutely. And one of the things I was struck by when I came to the finance seminar
was your list of, I think there's about 10 things on the checklist. Do you have super
sorted or do you have a will sorted? And there's a range of other things. I'm like, oh, yes,
yes, no.
Did I make you cry? Did I make you cry?
Not quite.
I know.
It definitely hits home where you're like, oh, like I thought I had everything sorted
and now maybe not so much.
Surprising. It really is surprising.
Yeah.
And that's come from having financial planning practice for 10 years and broking for 20 years
as well and just knowing what it is that people don't know or don't have in place. And it's
little things like if you have a family, even if you have a house, a mortgage, those sorts
of things, you really need to consider life insurance. And not only just consider it,
a lot of the time as a mortgage broker, I would talk about it just to make sure. If
I'm going to get you into half a million dollars worth of debt, you need to know that you're
safe and your family's not going to be displaced if you pass away. So just little things like
that. And a lot of people would say, oh, yeah, no, no, no, I've got something in super. And
they would be happy to walk away with that sort of response. And I'd stop them and say,
but hang on, do you know how much it is? Oh, yeah, no, I thought it would be fine. But
when we actually drilled it, drilled down, it might only be a hundred thousand, 150,000
or something. When I used to sit down with them as an advisor, we would go through a
whole realm of questions of things, you know, what if, if this situation happened, how much
money would you need to fix that problem or to sort it out or, you know, to provide some
family relief around that particular situation? And it was a real eye opener. So little things
like that. And, you know, even from money management and, you know, dare I say things
like zip pay and after pay and those sorts of things.
Which can be great if you know how to use them wisely and get rid of the debt without
then accruing interest from it. But yeah, can also be...
Yeah, exactly. And credit cards as well. Like you've got people that love credit cards and
you've got people that hate credit cards and you've got people that are almost, you know,
in a cult following for a certain fantastic ex-financial advisor who writes books and
doesn't wear shoes. You know, I won't say his name because everybody knows who he is.
He's anti credit cards. But the reality is if you could get your shiz sorted and you
understood, credit cards can actually make a massive difference to a mortgage. You can,
you know, by structuring it correctly and using it, taking advantage of the bank's
free money on a credit card, using it wisely, you can save anywhere between five and eight
years off a mortgage. Even double it if you do it really well. But again, my little disclaimer
there is it depends on what your expenses are, your living expenses are and the way
that you work your money. There's so much benefit to be had as long as you stick to
a plan. And I think that's the vital thing is sticking to a plan. And also if you're
one of those people that had parents that were in debt to credit cards all their life
or you've been in debt to credit cards all your life and you're just scared of them,
the mindset mentoring that we do will help you understand and get over that fear or work
out what that fear is and try and work through it and help you create some good habits around
credit cards just to help you succeed.
Well, thank you so much. That's been super informative. And if you've got any questions
or you would like to join the 60 Days to Success program, please jump on board and send Facebook
page to...
I look forward to chatting.
Thank you again. That's been a pleasure.
Lovely.
I'm Quinn Carnegie and I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of Manifestation, Motivation
and Passion. I'm so thrilled you chose to spend time listening and would be even more
grateful if you left a positive review. And if you found value, no doubt your family and
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