I remember back in 2016 when I was chatting with a friend who had been in the Financial Advisory (FA) industry for almost a decade. I went back home that night feeling shocked and yet extremely excited because I learnt that FA in Singapore was still very much in a rudimentary stage.
The general approach focuses a lot on ascertaining and prioritizing the clients’ needs and immediately zooming into a product-allocation. As I had been managing my own personal portfolio for years, I quickly realized that this approach, while it is effective from a sales perspective, is likely to sub-optimize the clients’ portfolios.
To illustrate my point, if a client wishes to plan for his/her retirement, a common approach would be to ascertain the client’s retirement shortfall taking into account his available assets and thereafter prescribing an investment or annuity product to address the shortfall. Sounds familiar? What if I tell you that this approach is actually sub-optimizing your portfolio because one would quickly realize that by asking yourself some basic questions like:
(1) Does this take into account short term needs such as loss of income due to job lay-off?
(2) Is there a plan to pay up existing liabilities such as the housing loan to reduce debt and building more towards your retirement
(3) How about reducing taxes by topping up into your CPF Special Account (SA) or even making Supplementary Retirement Scheme (SRS) contributions?
A lot more thorough planning and scenario-testing needs to be considered when planning for even a single milestone as your financial assets and liabilities are intertwined. Therefore, it brings me immense pleasure to introduce the Total Portfolio Advisory© (TPA) approach – a revolutionary personal wealth management system that is designed to provide you with the certainty in life as you are able to construct an effective financial portfolio that evolves with your ever-changing life’s needs through sound Asset Allocation (AA) strategies. The TPA approach is founded on two very simple and logical concepts:
(1) Employing financial accounting to evaluate and improve one’s personal financial statements; and
(2) Developing, deploying and tracking your AA Plan.
The TPA approach seeks to reduce financial uncertainties by first projecting likely life milestones with defined time horizons and financial commitments, and thereafter employ a holistic asset allocation strategy to chart out the various financial instruments and targets. Finally, these instruments are actively tracked and adjusted to ensure that the targets are on track.
If you like what you have read so far, I now invite you to take the next and most important step today, speak to us today to bring your financial portfolio to its fullest potential!
Meanwhile, as always, #staycalmandlakopi
Best Rgds,
Dexter Koh, MBA, CFP
