Blog
Welcome to our Personal Finance Blog
Money bewilders most of us. How to spend it, save it, invest it, and how to best protect the person who makes it.
These questions we all face daily — a puzzle we all attempt to understand and solve just about every day. Yet despite money's centrality to our lives and businesses, it's something we all grapple with, and mostly in private.
- Money is the 'Lord Voldemort' of topics; feared by most and mentioned by a few. It's oddly uncomfortable to discuss socially and rarely even with our partners, parents, and children.
Perhaps that's because managing our money and life's risks inevitably involves the fusion of both the emotional and practical aspects of our decision-making processes. The most difficult of questions are those with both economic and emotional answers.
Our educational Personal Finance Blog is for people who want to grow and remain wealthy. And while the journey toward wealth is clearly marked, you still have to be looking in the right direction.
At Sapience, we're all about The How.
Thinking about setting some financial goals this year?
Sounds simple enough right? But simple doesn't always mean easy
When it comes to managing our personal debts and credit cards, savings and investing, many people are quick to look for a sequence of simple steps to follow (or a three-minute blog to read) to achieve what can usually be a complex outcome.
Goodbye 2020
Now that 2020 is behind us, it's time to check in on the emotional and financial damage suffered by the millions of Australians affected by COVID-19.
Job losses for some, reduced work hours for others, still, others forced into early retirement - ready or not - many small businesses surviving one month at a time and families trying to make sense of lockdowns and restrictions - it’s safe to say there will be many COVID-19 flow on effects yet unseen.
We’ll all need to work through in some way.
What happens when business owners use their own money in the business?
Most small to medium business owners will tell you they went into business to provide for their family, in greater flexibility, time, increased resources, and leaving a legacy.
Like most long term plans, building a self sustaining business takes time; time to mature, time to stabilise in the market, and time to return the capital invested.
To achieve this, the majority of business owners use debt and overdraft facilities as ongoing business tools.
And these types of financial tools can quickly work against you and your family if you're unprepared.
Let's not do this year again
This year, 2020 has been a year where the confidence of many people has been tested.
In Australia it started in January 2020 with;
- unseasonably extreme bushfires that burnt over 46 million acres (or 186,000 square kilometers) with devastating effects on life; and then
- major flooding over Queensland and NSW that saw a year's worth of rain delivered in just a few days, with devastating effects; and then
- the global coronavirus pandemic; (first declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in January 2020, and then a Pandemic in March 2020).
As we close out 2020, it's fair to say, ‘it's been a tough year’.
Living with depression or an anxiety disorder shouldn’t stop you from getting your life insurances sorted.
As if living with a mental illness, like anxiety or depression, wasn’t difficult enough - getting your life insurance sorted when you're living with these conditions can seem overwhelming too.
Thankfully good mental health is now becoming part of the regular conversations for many Australians.
Here are tips to help navigate the application process.
How to leave an inheritance to your Grandchildren, but not your Adult Children?
The reasons why you may wish to leave an inheritance directly to a grandchild and not your adult children are as wide and varied as the motivation to do so.
Just leaving money via your Will for a grandchild to be held in trust until they reach 21 is fraught with risks; from a challenge to your Will to concerns about the effects of addiction, divorce, and financial mismanagement.
- Are you remarried with adult children from a past relationship?
- What you can't give away in your Will and why?
- How to start the talk about money with your parents without being a jerk
- What is an account based pension and why should I care?
- Investing and self control in uncertain times
- Understand Risks and Responsibilities of Small Business Owner Directors
- Its enough to make you want to wash your mind out
