Power of Social Amanda Cassar Director, Wealth Planning Partners.
In 2015, Amanda Cassar travelled to Uganda as part of the Hunger Project. She talks to Jamie Williamson about how the experience shaped her approach to financial advice.
A bit of planning and forethought may help take the financial stress out of Christmas.
Christmas for many families, is a happy time of year that brings people together, but it can also be expensive!
With a bit of early planning you may control your festive season spending.
Here are some tips to help avoid a New Year financial blowout. You don’t want a heart attack when you get that statement in January!
You know it makes sense, but it can seem a bit Scrooge-like. Start with the total amount you want to spend. Divide this into gifts, catering, entertainment and travel and list the items you need to purchase in each. Then put a spending cap on each category.
Draw up a gift list and allocate how much you want to spend on each person. If money is tight, consider options such as vouchers for home-cooked meals or gardening as alternatives.
It may help for big groups of relatives or friends to agree in advance upon a spending cap per gift. Another option is to do a Secret Santa by choosing each other’s names randomly from a hat. Each person then buys the person they picked a gift, instead of buying for everyone.
Set up a special bank account early in the year and use a regular auto payment option. The sooner you start saving, the more you will have.
You’ll also be able to make the most of all those annual specials from Boxing Day forward!
Wandering through the shops without knowing what to buy may cause you to overspend. Do your research first, then set out with your shopping list in hand and stick to it.
Be prepared to bargain as smartphones make it easy to compare prices. Avoid last-minute shopping as this may result in rushed and expensive decisions. Even better, pick up bargains in the sales earlier in the year and put them aside.
Above all, keep your head and stick to what you can afford.
The holiday season is one of the most expensive times to travel, so it may be worth considering house swapping, camping or having a staycation. If you are travelling, a budget will help you stay
on track.
I’d love to hear some of the ways you stay on track each Xmas without blowing your budget! Let us know in the comments and share your top tips!
Unexpected events can play havoc not only with people’s lives but also with businesses.
However, business owners are often so busy they don’t stop to consider the true cost of the loss of a key employee, business partner or even themselves.
The knock-on effects may include disruption to other staff, missed opportunities, delays or penalties for late delivery of projects, lost revenue, increased expenses, significant costs to find and train a suitable replacement, loan repayment and even loss of the business.
Key-person insurance protects a business’s financial position against the significant impact of a traumatic event such as the death or disablement of a key person.
A key person may be an employee, owner or an individual whose contribution to the business is significant.
This cover is not a specific kind of insurance but the application of life insurance to protect against key-person risk. It can be used with buy/sell life insurance (also known as business succession insurance) which covers the change of ownership if an owner dies or becomes incapacitated.
Often a cash injection to an affected business may keep a bad situation from becoming worse or even catastrophic. The insurance proceeds may be used to:
A business may have other strategies to help manage their risks, including asset sales, promoting staff or reallocating workloads even temporarily, using profits, borrowing more, or drawing down existing loan facilities.
However, insurance is the only practical alternative where a business doesn’t have the capacity to cover its risks.
Feeling generous and want to make a difference? Here are five tips on giving to consider.
An estimated 14.9 million Australian adults (80.8 per cent of the population) gave $12.5 billion to charities and not-for-profit organisations in 2015–16.[1]
For many people, donating comes as a response to a specific request, but if you feel strongly about helping out, why not budget for it?
As well, many people plan to leave money to charities in their wills and with some extra thought in estate planning, a bequest can be made in a tax-effective way.
Regardless of how you give, it’s always important to keep accurate records of your donations to give to your accountant at tax time.
Giving to the less fortunate is a good thing to encourage from a young age. Certain schools make volunteering part of their programs but even parents can encourage philanthropy through their own actions. Giving is good for both the donor and the recipient, and it makes the world a better place.
It’s an obvious question, but at the very least the charity’s mission and goals should align with yours. Is it doing good works in the areas that concern you? Do you feel strongly about what it is doing with your money?
Most organisations are happy to advertise their successes through videos, photos, testimonials, and their annual reports to help you get a more complete picture.
Being charitable can also mean pitching in and helping, which is a great way of finding information and making connections. This will help you decide whether the organisation fits your values and goals, and make you feel more fulfilled knowing you are making a difference.
Giving circles are a solution for people who don’t have a lot to give. This just means getting a group of 100 or so people together who each contribute perhaps $1,000 to create a pool of $100,000. They donate the lot to one charity to make a big impact.
If you would like to make giving part of your financial plan, your adviser can help you get the most out of your philanthropic efforts.
[1] www.philanthropy.org.au/tools-resources/fast-facts-and-stats/
A new study links stress with heart disease, but there are easy ways to stay healthy and protect your heart.
Stress is part of modern life but a new study shows that being stressed takes a serious, and lasting, toll on your health and increases your risk of heart disease.
The multi-year study published in the medical journal The Lancet is the first to pinpoint how stress affects the body. Stress apparently triggers the amygdala – the part of the brain keyed specifically to respond to stress – which then activates bone marrow and inflames the arteries.
This is a survival mechanism that would have been essential for the earliest humans as it prepares the body to deal with a harmful experience. Bone marrow produces the white blood cells necessary for tissue repair. Wider arteries increase blood flow.
However, today, the over-production of white blood cells can cause a build-up of plaque in the arteries and lead to heart disease.
The people in the study with higher amygdala activity had a greater risk of cardiovascular disease and developed problems sooner than those with lower activity.
“Eventually, chronic stress could be treated as an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease, which is routinely screened for and effectively managed like other major cardiovascular disease risk factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure and diabetes,” says study author and cardiologist Dr Ahmed Tawakol.
“So far, it appears that things like mindfulness and other stress-reduction approaches seem to really nicely tamp down on the amygdala, and they appear to even cause benefits in other areas of the brain.”
The other stress-reduction approaches are diet and exercise.
Regular exercise triggers feel-good chemicals in the brain such as dopamine and endorphins. It also reduces the damage the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline cause.
Physical activity relieves tension and helps enrich your brain with oxygen and nutrients, which can improve cognitive functioning and leave you feeling energised and alert.
Exercise should be teamed with a healthy diet low in refined sugar, saturated fats, salt and alcohol, and high in fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, lean meats and unprocessed foods.
As an added bonus, you may even lose weight.
