John Cameron's personal blog

One of the major messages that superfunds direct to young people is not as straight forward as it seems – and may even hurt them financially.

You see, superannuation funds often encourage young people to put extra money into superannuation, so that they can reap the long term benefits of compounding.  The logic is simple – put more money in now and there will be more there to grow and compound over the long term – possibly lots more.

The result of the funds’ projections is pure mathematics – and maths does not lie. 

Income Protection insurance is about to make a change – for the worse.

The gold standard of income protection, has long been “agreed value” policies, and these have been the products that most advisers have recommended to their clients.

With agreed value contracts, the amount that you will receive when you go “on claim”, is agreed up front, at the time of taking out the policy, and is based on your income at the time of taking the policy out. This provides a high level of certainty of your cover. As Always, there is a catch. If the insurance company needs to (e.g. if it is losing money), then it can increase your premium (well, not just your premium but the premiums of everybody who has that sort of cover).

One of my favourite pastimes each Saturday is reading the weekly column by Nikki Gemmell, in The Weekend Australian magazine. She writes about life and the lives of herself, her family and people she has known, and gently draws valuable lessons from them.

Last Saturday, she wrote about 2 people who had been high profile in their day, earning big money. However, their later years were nothing like their early years. The money ran out, their health deteriorated and they spent their last days in relative poverty.

That’s a story that we are likely to hear more of, as the population ages, but it is a problem that Financial Planners are well positioned to help you avoid.

Most of us had retirement dreams, and couldn’t wait to finish work. So once retired, why haven’t we started ticking items off the bucket list? There’s no time like now for living your dreams.

When Tony and Chris retired they had grand plans involving a campervan, Kakadu and a rescue-dog. Their great Australian road-trip was happening the very next year, after they, “just got few things out of the way”.

Things like their daughter’s November wedding, then the kitchen reno in January. Kakadu wasn’t going anywhere; it would wait until July – after Chris’s knee reconstruction.

Imagine the following. You know a young couple with a family, a mortgage, and all the other commitments that go with modern family life.

Then, tragically, one day one of the parents is killed.

When the survivor gets him or herself back together after a few days, the survivor contacts their insurance company, to lodge a claim, only to be told that their insurance has been cancelled because of changed government laws.

Anybody following the Hayne Royal Commission could be excused for thinking our superannuation system is broken. It is not – although parts of it need serious repair.

An excellent article in the Australian Financial Review of 18-19 August, addressed and dispelled a number of myths surrounding the superannuation system.

The author of the Chanticleer column identified the following myths:

Good question. When you look beneath the surface of the Account Based Pensions offered by major superannuation funds, the answer is “quite a lot”.

How well an Account Based Pension serves you depends on its returns, and the risks taken to get those returns. Any financial planner worth his or her fee can help you structure a portfolio that provides a risk/return trade-off that meets your needs, both initially and, most importantly, over the years

The major tool to manage risk is “asset allocation”. This is a simple idea, and it relates to how much you have in safe, low risk investments, such as term deposits, cash and short term Government bonds, compared with how much you have in more volatile (but potentially higher yielding) investments such as shares, and property.

Often when you go to a financial planner to plan your retirement, they will give you a graph to show how your capital might fare over a period.

The process is fairly simple. You start with an amount of capital, it earns interest, dividends and growth over time, and this grows the amount of capital. Deduct the amount you draw to live on, and you are left with a balance. Then, draw a graph of the balance each year, and there is your future capital mapped out.

However, this comes with at least 2 serious drawbacks.

Black Swan Events are things that happen, but nobody sees them coming. Mostly the term relates to events in the financial world, where markets change suddenly, without apparent warning. Examples include the GFC, and the 1987 sharemarket crash.

Black Swan events can also occur in our personal lives, such as when a close family member is struck down by a sudden illness, out of the blue and with no warning. A current example is diver Taneka Kovchenko, who had to withdraw from the Commonwealth Games because of a medical diagnosis that “one dive gone wrong could turn her into a paraplegic”.

Then there is the example of Tim Paine. Who, 12 months ago would have tipped him to be Australia’s captain? He had a record as an outstanding wicketkeeper, but his career was hampered by serious injury (a broken finger that took several surgeries to heal), and at the start of the season he was playing for Tasmania as a batsman, and seemed to be on the way out of first class cricket.

Most of the principles, ideas and guidelines around how to structure retirement income, have been developed by theoreticians, and are often impractical and out of touch.

Now, a financial planner with decades of practical experience, has produced a booklet that looks at the performance of different asset classes over almost 50 years. The main conclusion   –   there is no “best” answer across all times. It depends.

To download a copy, go to: http://www.blackswanevent.com.au/landing-page-lump-sum 

The term “Black Swan Events” has a particular meaning in investment circles.

The term refers to events that are unexpected and unforeseen. They can be either negative or positive, but such is human nature that the main focus is on negative events and their consequences. One recent Black Swan Event was the GFC in 2007 – 08. The GFC damaged a lot of people, and the overhang is still with us.

Generally, the term is used in financial markets, but then again, it can just as much be personal, and close to home – a sudden family illness, a major accident, or finding your home is riddled with white-ants and in need of major repairs. All of these could be very costly.

Recent reports in The West Australian have shown people nearing retirement are confused, with many planning to keep working beyond the “normal” retirement age of 65.

The state of confusion is hardly surprising, given the unique financial times we are in, and the mixed and often contradictory signals that emanate from various sources (who often are pushing their own barrow.)

Talking about mixed signals, let’s start with the stockmarket. Every night, commentators fill our television screens, with graphic accounts of how much the market has gone up, or down during that day. Even if nothing has happened, they still go to great lengths to make it graphic. But, then I guess that is the nature of television. A factual statement such as “nothing much happened on the market today”, - next story please -  would hardly have viewers glued to their sets. After all, there are ratings to think about, aren’t there!

Redundancy payments are in the air again, with the WA Government announcing plans to cut the number of public servants.

However, there is a nasty little surprise lurking in the tax laws for people over age 65. The tax treatment is very different either side of 65.

Just to be clear, what we are talking about are specific REDUNDANCY PAYMENTS. These are separate from superannuation and a range of other exit payments. Broadly speaking, a redundancy payment is a specific extra payment that is made when an employees’ job has been abolished, and the person is no longer required. Redundancies can be either voluntary, or not.

The recent Federal budget contained some incentives for older Australians to sell their homes and downsize. Specifically, people over 65, who were selling their home that they had owned for 10 years or longer, will be able to put $300,000 each into their superannuation. Previous restrictions that would prevent this, will not apply.

However, it remains to be seen how attractive this is, especially to people who may lose all or part of the age pension in the process. By freeing up capital in this way, it moves from the non-means testable area (your home), into the area where it becomes means testable. In the process, all or part of your age pension may be affected.

In our experience, people often decide not to downsize when faced with this loss of pension. However, this action is not logical and puts too much emphasis on the age pension. After all, the age pension is nothing but a source of income, and it is not inherently better than an alternative source of income.

1. Changing Times

For several years, we have been in an environment of ever falling interest rates, as Governments have relied on monetary policy to fix the damage wreaked by the GFC.

However, while this has arguably prevented some really horrible things from happening (such as a world-wide depression), it has not succeeded in making good things happen. Now many are looking to more Government spending to boost economic growth. In this context president-elect Donald Trump spoke on election night of modernising America’s often old and creaking infrastructure and making it the world’s best. Depending on the scale, this would indeed be a game changer. If successful, it could also draw other countries down this path, as well as lead to rising (instead of falling) interest rates.

Miracle of Miracles, Wonder of Wonders -  the much debated, and heavily criticised (by some) changes to the superannuation system have passed Parliament and are set to become law. The original changes (amendments) were announced in the May budget. As a result of heavy criticism, the original amendments have been amended sufficiently to pass through the Parliament.

Passage through Parliament at this time indicates a degree of cooperation between the various political parties. It was starting to look like they may not pass until the March sitting of Parliament, and this would have put their implementation date under pressure, as the changes are due to start on 1st July, 2017.

Now the work begins of looking closely at the details. On first glance, it looks like the effects of the changes will vary greatly between different individuals. Some people will see no change at all. For others, the changes will be substantial. More to come.

It seems that the “culture wars” continue spreading, and have now reached the corporate regulator, ASIC, itself. 

Remember, we are dealing with culture as being the values and norms that an organisation holds and which drives much behaviour, not culture as in music, statues and paintings.

Before continuing, let me wind back a few months.

We call our business “Black Swan Event Financial Planning” for a very specific reason – to keep reminding ourselves that, despite the best efforts of the legions of financial analysts in the world, there is an awful lot that nobody knows when it comes to giving financial advice.

Too often the exercise of doing projections provides a false sense of certainty about how somebody’s position may evolve over time. It’s almost as if the exercise of coming up with numbers enhances the certainty of a future outcome – without looking into the assumptions behind the calculations. Then, hey presto, some unanticipated change happens, and the projections go out the window.

Changes of this kind are known as “Black Swan Events”, and the crunch is that they happen far more often than theory dictates. This point (the fact that things changed in big ways much more often than they were meant to) was noticed by Nazim Taleb, and formed the basis of his book, “The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable”. It also enabled him to pursue a very successful career as a New York fund manager.

The video Securing your Future: featuring John Cameron was in the top 10 of the most viewed videos on The West Australian website Monday (12th Sept 2016).

"Different decades, different investment returns" 

You can watch it here: Securing your Future

George Bush lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton by focussing on the wrong thing. Bush focussed on his record, and success in Gulf War one. Clinton focussed on the economy and jobs, and won the election, thus giving rise to the saying “It’s the economy, stupid”. In other words, focus on the right thing.  Often it is right in front of you, and afterwards you can seem stupid for not spotting it.

It’s much the same when it comes to planning your financial future.

Too often we see people focussing on particular financial products as a cure to their financial ills. Often the discussion goes along the lines of, “Should we have an allocated pension?” or, “Is an annuity the answer?” or “Is superannuation worth it?” or …….