Today, we look at the interplay between hard work and good work. We have a saying here at Money Over 50: with your hard work and our good work, we can achieve great things.
Getting ahead financially requires two key ingredients – hard work and good work. It’s not enough to just work hard – because putting in long hours doesn’t necessarily get you where you need to be. On the other hand, having excellent strategies and a solid financial plan won’t get you anywhere if you don’t actually act on it. You need a combination of both of those things – a bit like a 2-ingredient cake (if only it were that easy!)
By hard work, we mean putting money away each fortnight to get to where you need to be for your retirement. The good work is where we come in: we’ll look at tax-effective legislation, government benefits, super contributions and investments in order to help you. And like the cake, it all needs to bake – meaning it takes time to get to where you want to be. There are no shortcuts or ways to fast track the process – in the same way you need time to pull out an adequately-baked cake!
We can make a good plan for our clients, but they still need to go to work, earn the money and put the strategies into practice.
Imagine the idea of only doing one of these things in a sporting team: a new coach arrives and says to the players: ‘okay, I am so great at what I do that you don’t need to practise; just get out there and play, follow my strategies, and we’ll be fine’. Of course, that is not going to end well for the team. This is why we say hard work and good work are equally important – strategy as well as practice. The same goes for advisers: a lot of them get clients by saying they will do everything for them. But clients still need to work hard as well – it’s not enough to just have a good strategy.
Usually between the ages of 50 and 55, people really start to think about their retirement plan and come to see us. Let’s say someone comes to us with $700,000 in their super, but wants to reach $2 million for a really comfortable retirement. There are a number of steps they would need to take over the next 10-15 years in order to achieve this goal by making the money work as hard as possible (find out exactly how in the podcast
How to Turn $700,000 into $2 Million).
For the best possible results, it’s important to have a balance of hard work and good work – that is, having the right strategy in place as well as implementing it.
The icing on the cake is that it’s never too late: get in touch with us if you’d like to organise an obligation-free meeting, in person or on Zoom:
podcast@mo50.com.au. We can help you work out the right strategies to get to where you need to be in your retirement.
Listen to the related podcast here!