Hannah McQueen - Kill Your Mortgage & Sort Your Retirement: The go-to guide for getting ahead

Every effort has been made to provide accurate and authoritative information in this book. Neither the publisher or the author accepts any liability for loss caused to any person acting as a result of information in this book nor for any errors or omissions. Hannah McQueen is a registered financial advisor and a director of enableMe NZ Ltd, a seminar presenter and a bestselling author on personal finance. Her opinions are personal and are of a general nature. She is not aligned to any bank or investment product. Readers are advised to obtain specific advice from a licensed financial adviser before acting on the information contained in this book.

First published in 2015

Copyright Hannah McQueen 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

ISBN 978 1 877505 51 5

eISBN 978 1 92526 804 1

Typeset by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

To Cameron and Madison

Contents

To get ahead it is often said you need to spend less than you earn, invest wisely and start early. These rules applied to our grandparents, and they still apply to us.

Dont be distracted by how simple this sounds, though. It is simple, yesits just not easy. And heaven forbid you should have started your run late, be a shopper or have gone through a divorce or some financial setback that forces you to start again!

Despite many teachings to the contrary, we are not all starting from an equal financial footing. Some of us are financially favoured, others are financially challenged. Many of us are starting on the back foot, and as a result will need to punch above our weight.

Financial success is not a rite of passage. Financial success favours the brave and those who have a well-thought-out plan. Irrespective of where you are starting from, you must diagnose your situation accurately, understand your psychology of spending, learn how to budget effectively and save for a property, and navigate the many financial roadblocks life will throw at you. If you have a mortgage, you must learn how to attack it, to kill it.

Do not be nave enough to think the bank is your friend. Do not be silly enough to think that a celebrity endorsing an investment makes it a good one. You must learn the art of financial warfare.

Paying off your mortgage is a strategic step towards financial success, but this in isolation will not achieve a comfortable retirement. You need to understand how much time you have and the investment constraints you must work within. What is good for the goose is not always good for the gander. Keep your head, understand your options and move forward. Being the underdog simply means you have to take a less traditional route to get to the end. As the saying goes, you have to learn the rules of the game, and then you have to play better than anyone else.

Many a book and movie has been written about ordinary people facing opponents or ideas bigger than themselves. We aptly call it a David and Goliath situation. In fact, the phrase David and Goliath has become entrenched in our dialect as a metaphor for coming up against something seemingly insurmountable. For a lot of baby boomers staring down the barrel of retirement, it can feel as if you are up against a powerful opponenttime, and the lack of itand the consciousness that you may be leaving or have left your run too late.

But whether time is on your side or not is irrelevant. Anyone approaching retirement has a financial place to be and a deadline to get there by. Some of you will be ready to push forward and take more purposeful steps on an already long-thought-out journey, but many of you will be starting off on the back foot, the financial underdog.

This book has been written to help people across the spectrum of retirement readiness. The question is, do you give up before you start? Or do you own the fact you are the financial underdog and use this realisation as the catalyst to sort out your money priorities? My hope is that after reading this book you will realise that being the underdog is not a reason not to try. It just means you have to take a less traditional route to the destination, as you have a wider space of ground to cover in a shorter amount of time.

I want you to appreciate the opportunities that are in front of you but you may have previously failed to see. I want you to understand that money is not bigger than you, retirement is not bigger than you, but, if we are going to sort this out, I need you to be brave. I will not lie: getting ahead financially can be tricky, especially if you are genetically programmed to shop (as I am), but it is not impossible. In fact, depending on where you are starting from, it may be a lot easier than you realise. This book will teach you the theory, it will show you the reality of your choices, and hopefully it will motivate you to confront yourself and take the required action to achieve a better financial outcome. Your psychology may initially work against you, but as you start to understand your natural tendencies and shortcomings you can set about developing the plan that will work for you.

Many financial books assume you are already in control of your finances. For the vast majority this is simply not the case. This book will start at the beginning, showing you how to diagnose your starting point in order to better determine the route you need to take to a comfortable retirement. It will build on this diagnosis and show examples of how you can change your money personality and how you can do better than the Joneses. It openly discusses money and relationships, including sensitive themes such as surviving financial infidelity and the financial warning signs of new partners. Poor negotiation skills may mean you are not paid what you are worth, and lack of confidence can mean you seldom tackle this head-on. This book also discusses how best you can teach your children what they need to know to get ahead in the disastrous economy we are going to leave behind. Most importantly, this book breaks down the jargon and throws away what you have been taught about saving for your financial success and retirement.

I have a company called enableMe. We call ourselves Financial Personal Trainers. We are a team of chartered accountants and financial advisors working with our clients to get them ahead faster. We are not aligned to any particular investment product or bank. We provide impartial, expert and astute advice. We work with our clients at the coalface, understanding the nuances of each situation and determining the best plan of attack to bridge the gap between where our clients are going to end up if they change nothing and where they need to be in order to achieve their financial goals.

My team and I have worked with over 4000 clients, and in this time have come to realise that anyone can get ahead when the sun is shining and life is rosy, but it is a whole lot harder to make progress when you are hit with your financial Mack truck. As Warren Buffett so eloquently phrased it, it is not until the tide goes out that you find out who is swimming naked. Lack of knowledge, lack of confidence and lack of action means we sabotage our own efforts to get ahead, to make progress, to kill our mortgage and save for retirement.