It’s been a long journey. I joined Bank of NSW (now Westpac) in 1958 and had a succession of jobs, including six years in the international department, until I resigned in 1968. During that time, I completed my banking studies and became an Associate of the Bankers Institute of Australia.
I left the bank to study law and even though I did well in my exams, I discovered I didn’t like law – I’m too entrepreneurial for that. However, by the time I was 30 I had a good legal and banking background.
In 1974, I read Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich and my life changed totally. I made two promises: first, to spend the rest of my life promulgating the book’s principles; and second, to start my own business within 100 days. It actually took 160. I went into partnership with a builder, and we opened a real estate office to sell our properties. In the late 1970s, it was almost impossible to obtain finance, and we started a brokerage house to get finance for our buyers. In 1980, we saw the future of financial planning, closed up the real estate division then expanded the mortgage business to include financial planning and superannuation. When we sold it in 2007, it had 100 staff and more than $2 billion under advice.
Your first book Making Money Made Simple is still selling strongly, 25 years on. Why did you write it?
I’ve always loved to write and in the 1980s had a column in the Brisbane Courier Mail called ‘Key Money’, which was about real estate. That led to a talkback program on Radio 4BC at 6am on Saturdays! One day, a woman rang and said, “You write good stuff in the paper and give good advice on radio – can you give me the name of a book which contains all that stuff?” I told her I’d find a book and give the name of it the following Saturday, but there was nothing available – so I decided to write one. However, I procrastinated until, in 1985, I attended a course called Vision Quest that changed my life. We had to imagine our dying day and what we had contributed to the world. Like a flash of lightning, I got the message that my purpose on earth was to help ordinary people prosper by educating them about money. That was the catalyst to start writing.
Is giving free advice at odds with running a financial planning business?
I’m concerned about the way over-regulation has taken access to financial advice away from ordinary people. Our business worked on a commission basis, when a person could invest $5,000 and we were happy to take a four per cent commission – just $200 – in the hope the person would become a lifelong client. Those days are now gone and almost every financial planning practice will charge a minimum of $2,500 for advice. This leaves poorer people with no option but to go to the big banks for financial planning advice.
So, I guess I’m really happy to make people aware of what they need to do, but it’s a long, slow process.
