How we work with you

Our four stage process ensures that APW provides an individually designed approach and ongoing support for each of our valued clients, for proven results.

Understanding you

We don’t give a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Our process begins with learning about you. We want to know answers to questions like:

What’s important to you?
What do you want your life to look like?
What are your goals and aspirations?
What do you value?

We help you refine and define your goals and objectives to ensure that the strategic plan is tailored uniquely for you.

Strategy & investment analysis

There’s a whole universe of investment options and strategies out there to choose from. It can get overwhelming for anyone! Let us do all the hard work and alleviate your burden by helping you answer questions like:

What resources do I have?
When can I retire?
How much do I need to invest (and where) to get where I need to be?
What rate of return do I need to achieve?

Advice and implementation

A strategic plan is only as good as its execution. In this step, we work together with your external professional advisers (e.g. accountants/lawyers) to provide targeted advice on:

Superannuation
Investments
Risk Management
Estate Planning
Structures

We will then facilitate the implementation of the strategic plan to ensure that it is well and truly in place.

Ongoing relationship

We aspire to build lasting and meaningful relationships with our clients. We want to be close enough to our clients to know about any major life decisions that may impact financial decisions. Life is not static, and therefore it doesn’t make any sense for a strategic plan to be either, therefore we will work with you to regularly review where you’re at in life and make changes to the strategic plan accordingly. Let us help you:

Spend more time doing the things you love
Reduce the burden of any money worries you may have
Focus on the priorities of your overall financial plan or goals

Relationship management

We have strong internal processes that ensures each client receives the same experience regardless of who is in their primary advisory team.

We also have an extensive network of professional relationships in Australia and globally to ensure we can resolve any financial issue that a client brings to us as part of our Strategic Planning service.

Strategic planning

Making smart decisions on what matters most to you. Our strategic planning services are tailored specifically to your unique goals and aspirations, including:

Wealth enhancement

For many successful families, preserving and optimising wealth is their core financial concern. Growing and preserving wealth is not primarily measured by a periodic investment statement – although that can be reassuring – but by its ability to help you and your family meet your challenges and fulfil the many goals that give your life meaning. Strategies to optimise your wealth include:

Cash flow and Debt management
Planning with your accountant to develop a framework for effectively dealing with tax
Clarity of goals and regular progress reporting
Remuneration planning for professionals
Superannuation advice
Asset review to ensure optimal resource allocation

Wealth protection

In today’s world, we are all concerned about protecting what we have worked so hard for. This includes not just our financial assets, but our property, confidential information and, most important of all, our loved ones. By thoughtfully protecting your wealth against catastrophic loss, potential creditors, litigants and identity thieves, you help ensure that you and your loved ones will be able to achieve your goals. Some of the areas we focus on include:

Legal Structures – establishment and ongoing gap analysis
Personal insurance needs for the whole family
General insurance Personal risk identification and mitigation

Wealth transfer

Taking care of your family means more than just short term needs – it can extend to a time when you may not be around to take care of them. As a family steward, you want your spouse, children and possibly succeeding generations to be financially secure. This makes estate planning one of the most important areas of successful families’ financial lives, yet it is often misunderstood or overlooked completely. And whilst documenting your wishes is essential, as important is preparing heirs to successfully receive and make use of the assets they will eventually inherit. Using both our internal expertise and our professional network, our Wealth Transfer processes focus on:

Estate Planning
Delegation of financial and health authority
Planning
Long term aged care planning
Preparedness of your family for change and major life transitions
Tax structures

Investing

Everything we do is based on evidence, not opinions or speculation.

We take the responsibility of handling your money seriously. We don’t try to predict the daily, weekly or monthly movement of financial markets – and all the research over the past five decades confirms no one else can do this either, no matter how big they are or how many analysts they employ.

Rather than try to predict the future to have a successful investment experience, our approach focuses on the following:

Growing our deep working relationships with the global academic community

We regularly meet with leading financial academics to incorporate new research into our approach. In particular, we work with the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business, which counts six Nobel Prizes laureates amongst its faculty members.

Strategy doesn’t change with economic conditions

We manage through markets based on where a client is in their life, not to the daily ups and downs of markets. We successfully navigated the GFC for clients, with no frozen funds or substantial losses in portfolios.

A good company is not necessarily a good investment

We use research to identify dimensions of the market that offer the highest expected returns and specifically target them through advanced portfolio design, trading and implementation.

Transparency

A client always knows what they’re invested in and we avoid complex, tax driven products.

Humans are poorly wired for investing

As much as we use evidence and science to build portfolios, we understand the importance of discipline and removing emotion, guesswork and speculation from the investment process.

Maximise the probability of reaching your goals

We tailor our approach for each client. Increasingly, our approach is favoured by ultra-high net worth families around the world.

Benchmarking

Knowledge is the key to success.

Your financial success is directly related to a deep understanding of the things that matter most. Consider the following key questions:

Is the philosophy behind my investment strategy supported by decades of academic evidence?
What is the probability of my investments allowing me to achieve my goals?
What benchmarks are being used and reported on to measure my performance?
How do I know the return I am achieving is right for me?
What total costs do I pay annually (directly and indirectly) for: investment managers / financial advisers / transactions / wrap administration and custody
How concentrated to the Australian share market is my portfolio?
How dependent on the Aussie Banks and Mining companies is my portfolio?
Are my investments adequately diversified across global markets (including shares, property, bonds)?
What would a 10%, 30% or 50% fall in the share market mean for me? Could I recover?
Is my Adviser an Accredited Investment Fiduciary (AIF)

If you have a trusted adviser, be sure to clarify the items more, you are welcome to speak to APW at no initial cost.

Charitable giving

Charitable giving has long been an area of importance for successful families, and interest in philanthropy has risen in recent years.

APW Partners and our people have a lifelong commitment to grow, educate and support families and individuals who wish to engage in philanthropy and possibly create a family legacy that spans across generations. We have been working with families since the 1990s to help them use their wealth to benefit not just their family, but also the world around them and make the greatest possible impact in the process. APW Partners is a member of Philanthropy Australia.

Our role in helping families develop and implement their own philanthropic plan includes:

Education on philanthropy
Identification of shared family values
Establishment of appropriate structures, including family foundations such as Private Ancillary Funds (PAFs)
Mission statement; Investment Policy development
Foundation governance; ongoing administration Evaluation of projects and organisations to support. Never think of your efforts as charity – to be philanthropic is to be a social investor who requires measurable impact reporting
Strategic tax planning