| Welcome to the June issue of the Select Wealth Management Dashboard Newsletter. The most material event of the past 30 days has been the delivery of the budget for 2019. Government budgets can sometimes have significant bearings on a range of things – share markets, interest rates, individual's personal circumstances, business confidence, the list goes on. However, this budget was met with relatively muted response, suggesting that there was nothing in there that fundamentally changes the economic or financial landscape, and there was nothing unexpected. It's more or less a "business as usual" budget – typical of a mid-term budget.
I won't spend too much time on this because I have a more interesting story to share with you in a moment. But you can't ignore the budget either, so here is a quick summary.
So there it is – your typical mid-term Labour budget. Nothing much to see here... On so onto my more interesting story. Often, when I meet new people, I get asked what I do for a living (I'm sure you've experienced this at a BBQ). When I say I am a Financial Planner, it's apparent that people don't really know what it is exactly that a Financial Planner does. Do we invest money? Manage Wealth? Do a budget? Plan retirement? Recommend KiwiSaver? The fact is, we do all these things. If I were to sum it up in 1 sentence, I would say: "A good Financial Planner helps you achieve your financial goals – not by trying to turn a little money into a lot, but by ensuring that you don't turn a lot of money into a little." Financial Planning is really quite simple, and usually very boring – but it works. For the purpose of my story, I want you to keep the "ensuring that you don't turn a lot of money into a little" part of the above statement in mind. I have a client (let's call him Bob) who I recently met with for an annual review. Bob is a smart person – very well educated, astute, and retired from a very successful career in medicine. Bob is no fool. A few months ago, Bob received a phone call one evening from his internet service provider – Spark. The person calling was well spoken, polite, and calling from what sounded like a very busy call centre with lots of chatter in the background. So far, so good. The Spark employee informed Bob that his email address had been hacked, and that amongst other things, pornography was being sent to all his contacts from his email address. Obviously this concerned Bob immensely. Fortunately, the Spark employee could easily rectify this issue. All he needed to do was run through a few formalities with Bob while they were on the phone. Bob logged into his computer, and followed the seemingly harmless instructions that the helpful Spark employee was giving. After an hour or so on the phone, all had been resolved, and Bob was extremely relieved. Off to bed. When Bob logged onto his internet banking a couple of days later, he was surprised to see that his bank account (which had $50,000 in it 2 days ago), had a $0 balance. Not only that, his credit card had been maxed out too. Surely a mistake at the bank – right? So Bob strolled down to his local bank branch to sort out the little complication with his internet banking. But to his horror, he was informed by his bank that his account had been accessed and that the money was in fact missing. Turns out the helpful Spark employee wasn't a Spark employee after all, and certainly wasn't very helpful. And to make matters worse, the bank claims no accountability. Their position is that their bank security was not breeched, so they can't be responsible. Bob allowed someone access to his computer and they found his internet banking details – this is no fault of the banks. Just to be clear, Bob did not discuss anything to do with internet banking during the Spark call. He did not give away any bank passwords or login details. However, he did allow the caller remote access to his computer. And from this simple act, the caller managed to hack Bob's bank account. Bob has been fighting the bank for the past 7 months, doing all he can to try recover his money. But the bank has said they will only refund any money that they are able to track and recover from the hackers. So far, Bob has been refunded $10,000 from his bank, and he is not optimist about recovering any more. It's difficult to imagine how devastating this must be. Cyber security falls a long way outside of my mandate as a Financial Planner, but I was compelled to share this story with you. I've heard so many accounts of this type of scam, and always thought that the victims must be unsophisticated, simple people and the dollar values involved were relatively small. But Bob is the only person I have met who has been a victim of such a scam, and he is smart and lost a lot. So if sharing this story helps even just 1 person to avoid "turning a lot of money into a little", then it will have been worth it. Here are the numbers: |
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In terms of your Select Wealth Management portfolio, there have been no material changes in the past 30 days. We met with researchers JMI Wealth last month, but there were no significant changes to our investment menu at this stage. Our existing investment options continue to perform in line with expectations, and a few new investments have been added to the menu. Performance reports for 30 June will be out early next month, and the numbers should be fairly modest, but in line with expectation and peers. Finally, a quick update on our Giving Back program for Loren Harvey. We will be wrapping this campaign up at the end of June and launching a new one for the second half of the year. At this stage, it looks like we might fall just short of our target of $2,500 for Loren which is gutting, but there are a couple of weeks left so we are doing all we can to get over the line. You can learn a bit more at www.mifinancialplanning.co.nz/giving-back.html. As always, thank you so much for the referrals of your friends and family so that we can continue to fund this program – we really appreciate it. Until next time – keep well and GO YOU BLACK CAPS YOU GOOD THINGS!!!! Warm regards Dave and the team at Isaacs Financial Planning dave@mifinancialplanning.co.nz |
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This newsletter is intended for general distribution and does not constitute personal financial advice. Copy of my primary disclosure statement and secondary disclosure statement.