is don, is good

You might recall that after our quite horrible experience with the our bank’s financial planner (who tried to sell us ridiculously gold-plated insurance and offered no actual plan), we gave it another crack with an independent planner recommended to us by an ex-colleague.

We had an initial consult and liked what IFP (let’s call him Myers, or Briggs?) had to say and it was pleasing that he appeared interested in helping us meet our objectives, so we engaged him to develop a plan.

To review, our long term financial goals are:
* minimise our tax (Don always has a large tax bill at the end of the year)
* retire between 60 and 65 (everyone over 60 at SML has kind of lost the plot. I do not want to be that person!)
* have the mortgage paid off by retirement
* have $x in superannuation by retirement

Myers warned us I’m going to tell you straight now, but you will need to do some serious work on this. This was the sort of tough love we were hoping for.

After a couple of weeks, Myers came back with detailed projections for two scenarios:
1. Pour every bit of money we can into paying off the mortgage
2. Pour every bit of money we can into superannuation (retirement/pension fund for the non-Australians among you.)

Though not at all anomalous for Sydney standards, we have a pretty big mortgage. We borrowed well within our means (indeed, the banks were prepared to loan us almost double what we borrowed), but it is much $$$$$. According to Myers’ modelling for scenario 1, we could have the mortgage paid off in 9 years if we focused our energies onto it. So that is what we are intending to do from 1 July 2015.

Don and I can work pretty well toward a goal, so we’ve challenged ourselves to outperform forecast for the end of 2015/16. We’ve made a deal with ourselves to acquire anything we’ve been wanting (pretty dresses, anyone?) or needing before 30 June and then we’ll be frugalling up a storm for 6 months – just to see what we can accomplish.

Hopefully it will be all “eyes on the prize”, but we do have in inconvenient habit of talking each other into things like trips and dinners.

But it is really exciting to know that actually doing this is potentially achievable.