Frequently Asked Questions

Helping you and your family Live Well is at the heart of everything we do. Our services range from your “big picture” financial planning to the nitty gritty details that make it all work. We’ve included a list of services that we’re able to offer below:

• Financial Advice
• Investment Advice
• Superannuation
• Risk Insurance Management
• Portfolio Management – ‘TWD Invest’
• Separately Managed Accounts (SMAs)
• Wholesale Investment Advice
• Share Trading Platforms
• SMSF Advice and Services
• Cash Flow management
• Education Funding
• Not For Profit Services – ‘TWD For Purpose’
• Philanthropy
• Family Succession management
• Farm Succession planning
• Aged Care
• UK Pension Transfers
• Financial literacy program – ‘Start Well’

We’re glad that you asked and are happy to say that we have! We are so proud of all our awards and industry recognition. In particular, we’re delighted to have been recently awarded the Self-Licensed Company of the Year and Client Servicing Firm of the Year at the 2023 ifa Excellence Awards.

We find we work best when we understand your whole financial position and what you’re trying to achieve. We like to position ourselves as the ‘Chief Financial Officer’ of your finances, with you setting your goals and aspirations as the ‘CEO’. We then work with you and any of your other professionals to project manage your affairs and keep things moving in the right direction. Our years of experience have taught us that working across the full range of our clients’ financial lives over the longer term is how we help them remain on track and ultimately, achieve the outcomes that are most important to them.

We only work with clients where we can add value. While we want to work with as many people as possible, engaging our services is an investment in itself, and has to be financially feasible for our clients. Some examples of where we can (and do) add the most value are when clients have strong surplus cash flow that they want to put to work, clients who have generated or acquired lump sums which require professional management and clients whose finances are complex enough to benefit from the ongoing input of a professional. If we don’t believe we’re able to add value to you, we’ll let you know this upfront.

At The Wealth Designers, we believe financial advice is about helping our clients and their families to ‘Live Well’. At the outset, we work with you to identify your goals and aspirations, then get to work on building the best financial strategy to maximise the probability of achieving these outcomes. We work with you to set priorities and pre-empt any obstacles, challenges and complexities that may get in the way.

We don’t have a crystal ball, but we have the next best thing… financial modelling! We will use cash flow and asset projections over time, as well as reviewing the tax structures you are using, your superannuation and investments to set you up for the future you want. We’re all about keeping you safe, so we will ensure you and your family are protected with a risk management plan, which factors in your estate planning needs.

Financial planning is a long game, so we will stay connected on an ongoing basis so you and your plan remain on track.

We’re proud of our long list of five-star Google Reviews. You can take a look at them yourself below:

• Google reviews – Perth 
• Google reviews – Sydney

For Australians who have built significant success from enterprise, or have inherited substantial riches, we provide our Private Wealth offering. We’ve built a trusted concierge service where we’ll always be available to maintain and protect not only your money, but family harmony, succession, legacy, privacy, and delivering bespoke investment opportunities.

For these clients, we can provide a Wholesale Investment offering. This offering uses the services of our in-house investment team – TWD Invest. This is a team of some of the best experts at the top of their game, whose sole job is to watch the market daily, aiming to deliver the best investment propositions to our clients. This ensures we offer not only our best advice and relationship but also our smartest investment opportunities.

For many people, living well includes giving well. We can help not-for-profit organisations build their investment mandate and strategy, as well as manage these funds strictly in line with their charter.

We can also help families and individuals set up a philanthropic fund (PAF) as part of their estate planning or we can help them manage the investments of an existing PAF. We aim to help our clients make clear and informed decisions on their giving, maximise their impact and ensure it is the most tax-effective. We also help protect our clients via iron-tight screening and governance.

Heading overseas can be a great move for your career, your life experience and your finances, but it brings its challenges too. This is why we are fortunate to have our own in-house expat-specialist financial adviser, Patrick Canion, who can work with clients overseas in specific circumstances.

A Fellow of the Financial Advice Association of Australia (FAAA) and member of Association Romande des Intermediaries Financiers (ARIF), Patrick has a wealth of knowledge and experience in helping clients across the globe manage the complexities of international finance. For suitable clients, Patrick’s advice can include international investments, foreign currency considerations, navigating different tax regimes and estate planning across jurisdictions. Patrick is also supported by an extensive network of international tax, legal and other financial advice experts.

Delivering financial advice across different jurisdictions is a complex area, so we suggest you book an Intro Call to understand if and how we may be able to work together.

Book an Intro Call

All strong relationships are built on trust, understanding and communication, and our process delivers all of these.

From the outset, we work hard to get to know you and intimately understand what it means for you to Live Well. We begin with a complimentary intro call where we start to understand your goals and your needs and jointly determine if we’re the right fit for each other.

From there, we better understand your situation, aspirations and challenges in our Discovery Meeting.

From there, we present a Terms of Engagement, outlining our scope of work and your fee to engage The Wealth Designers, ensuring we are fully transparent and adding value.

If you decide to partner with us, we’ll then prepare and present your advice, implement it once accepted and work with you over the long term as a sounding board, to ensure you stay on course.

In this no-strings-attached session, we’ll spend some time getting to know you better and understanding your aspirations and challenges, so we can start to paint a picture of how we can help you achieve what’s most important to you. You’ll also learn more about The Wealth Designers and how we work, so you can decide whether we’re the right firm for you to partner with.

To be a great adviser, you have to connect deeply with people and understand how money works, and you’ll see us wearing both of these hats in our Discovery Meeting. Most clients say their Discovery Meeting is a real highlight of their experience as a client, and we feel the same way!

In this session, we’ll clarify your goals and aspirations, understand your financial situation in depth and identify any obstacles, and challenges that you’re experiencing. At the end, we’ll ensure you understand our service and next steps and if you are keen to progress, we’ll schedule a follow-up session to present our Terms of Engagement. This will outline our scope of work and the fee to engage The Wealth Designers, ensuring we are both fully transparent and adding value.

It depends on how complex your affairs are. We’ll always meet with you at least once a year, with meetings on a more regular basis if needed. We often find we may need several meetings in the first year as we create your bespoke Live Well plan. Once this is in place and we have you on track, we find an annual progress meeting is generally sufficient. Behind the scenes, our TWD Invest team are closely reviewing client portfolios. We’ll keep you updated and recommend changes as required.

We charge an initial fee followed by a 12-month Fixed Term Fee (generally paid monthly). Every client is different, and we’ll use our initial meetings to figure out what’s needed and where we can add value for you, which will determine the fee involved. Following on from our Discovery Meeting, we’ll be able to present our Terms of Engagement and clearly explain the fees involved. At your Annual Progress Meeting, we’ll present a new agreement for the next 12 months.

The value of financial advice varies from person to person. For some, it’s about achieving a percentage of investment return above certain benchmarks. For others, it’s about less tangible aspects such as the removal of stress and clarity of their path forward.

During our initial engagement, we will seek to understand what a valuable service means for you and the return you hope to achieve by working with us. From there, we’ll paint a picture of how we can deliver this value to you, and the associated fee.

It’s important we are always clear on what is valuable to you, so we can ensure our joint plan is delivering it. Each year, we will revisit what you would like to achieve through our service and ensure that our service is appropriate for, and aligned to your needs.

From an investment point of view, we aim to return a percentage above CPI over varying timeframes, depending on your investor risk profile. We cannot guarantee returns, but with a diversified portfolio invested astutely through our TWD service, we aim for our clients to achieve strong investment outcomes over the long term.

We don’t take commissions for any new products we put in place. However, our industry is full of legacy products and there are times when it remains appropriate to retain the product. But where we can, we’ll seek to remove the commission which generally provides a saving to the client.

No – The Wealth Designers is privately owned. This means we can cherry-pick the best investments and products for our clients’ needs. We use a range of products from several different financial product providers to best help our clients invest and protect themselves.

Not all financial advice firms are built equally, so here are some of the things that we believe make us different from others in the industry:

We care about your life, not just your finances

We understand wealth creation is driven by a desire to live well, and that definition changes from person to person. Our financial advice is designed not just to grow your net worth but to bring you closer to the life you dream of – now and in the future.

We focus on delivering value

We won’t commit to working with you unless we are 100% confident we can add value to you and your situation.

Our quality has been officially recognised

We’re proud our firm and advisers have won some of the most prestigious awards in Australian Financial Advice, such as the AFA (FAAA) Practice of the Year award. Awards aren’t the ‘be all and end all’ for us, but they’re a sign that we’re on the right track.

We have our own in-house investment team

With some of the best analysts in the country on hand, The Wealth Designers can offer you well-researched, tailored investment propositions consistently.

Our clients give us rave reviews

Don’t just take our word for it. You can read more about the difference we make to our clients here.

As financial advisers, we deal with your money matters. But as fellow human beings, we understand wealth creation is driven by a desire to live well, and that definition changes from person to person. That’s why our strategies are designed not just to grow your net worth but to bring you closer to the future you dream of. We are all about helping you to create a life with money and meaning, both now and in the future.

Living Well means something different for every individual, however, we can help make it happen for you with good financial planning. On a practical level, we can advise on growing your investments, increasing your income, minimising your tax, and protecting your assets. In essence, we do this groundwork so that you can get on with creating your version of Living Well.

TWD Invest gives our clients access to our senior investment team, comprised of internal financial analysts and external consultants at the top of their game. The sole job of this team is to monitor investments and the markets to construct the best investment portfolio possible for you.

TWD Invest benefits from the input and oversight of a comprehensive investment committee governance structure made up of some of Australia’s most respected investment professionals. All members meet regularly to discuss, research, probe, question, debate, and agree on recommendations and guidelines for our clients and to develop our overarching investment strategy.

TWD Invest sources research, securities, and product solutions from several independent and well-known providers (of course, none of these are related parties of The Wealth Designers). Additionally, we engage external investment specialists, Resonant Asset Management, to provide even more analytical and research support.

Our goal is to provide a world-class approach to investment portfolio advice, construction and asset allocation, meeting long-term client investment objectives whilst also closely monitoring and managing risk.

We build a diversified portfolio for clients. This generally includes a mix of direct equities, ETFs and managed funds across all types of asset classes – Australian equities, international equities, fixed interest, property, infrastructure, alternatives and fixed income. We also have access to Term Deposits and ‘at call’ accounts when needed for clients.

Start Well is a financial literacy program aimed at educating people about wealth creation by making smart decisions earlier around spending, superannuation and investments, so they can build a life with both money and meaning.

Start Well was born from research that shows us that most children and adults just aren’t getting access to the quality financial literacy they need. We want to right this wrong, so we offer education, tools and support for workplaces, community groups and children to help them level up their financial knowledge.

If you’re interested in finding out how Start Well can help your company, team, community group or child, get in touch with us today.