Good day. A written financial philosophy is one of the best ways to create a strong foundation for your practice. It is your advice roadmap and beliefs on paper. It is the rules and tools on how your advisors provide strategies on life insurance and wealth protection. Having these rules in writing gives consistency and advice for your clients. Also, the philosophy provides a professional tool for your advisors to provide advice confidently.

This financial philosophy that I'm talking about was created in our office. We created this because we had multiple advisors and we weren't sure if we were all giving the right advice at the right time. The financial philosophy has been designed to provide consistency across the practice. In our financial philosophy, we address the things that we have to have. For example, in life insurance, all of our advisors will ensure that the debts are covered. We will ensure that there is funding there, if there's a spouse, that there'll be an income provided until the youngest child is 18. In the event of total and permanent disability, we'll clear the debt again. We'll also ensure that there'll be funding for long-term care. And, in terms of critical illness, we have a set of rules as well. We always recommend that clients take a minimum replacement of one year's household income.

By doing this for many years now, I've been able to provide many trauma claim checks to families in Australia because of this level of minimum standard. The other thing, the philosophy allows us to have discussions with clients in regards to income protection so we can have a meaningful discussion around insuring their most important asset, their ability to earn and protect their income. For us, we created the philosophy to ensure that in the unfortunate event of illness, injury or death, that the insured and their family would have the least amount of financial hardship when it mattered most. Our philosophy ensures that families can remain in their homes, that children can go to their schools and get their preferred education. Most importantly, they have funding for food and they can pay their bills. Also, families will not be left behind a pay for debts created by the insured. For me, life insurance advisors can sometimes be treated like life insurance vending machines. With a financial philosophy, it empowers the advisor to give a professional opinion in all areas of wealth protection.

We also talk about the non-product things that we do in our financial philosophy. For example, it includes our documented claims promise. This is a promise in writing about what we will do and how we will be there for clients when it matters most. It's in writing and they know we’ll be there for them.

Affordability. We'll deal with the elephant in the room. We know that this is a client's biggest fear. Our document helps us address this and by doing so we can have meaningful discussions about both short- and long-term planning so that their insurance will be affordable today and tomorrow.

Replacing existing insurance. We have a very strict rule. If they don't get significant benefits or savings, we won't do it.

Estate planning. Making sure the benefits go to the right hands at the right times. I used to get embarrassed a lot with my dad at his meetings. He would say to people, "Making sure that your family remains friends after you're gone."

As advisors, we have a responsibility to share what we know and do to help people make informed decisions. At the end of the day, it's a client's prerogative to decide what risks they want to transfer to an insurer and how much they wish to spend on premiums, but it's our jobs, my job, your job to make sure that we give them the power to make an informed decision. At the end of the day, we have to honor them and make sure we give them all our trust and honesty. We can't be scared to not say what we believe. We owe that to our clients. Remember, what we do today can change lives tomorrow. Thank you.