Client Profile: Allen & Jill Broad
Jill and I have been clients of GFM since June 2004.
Jill was a primary school teacher, later working in the inner suburban/disadvantaged schools rising to Assistant Principal. Jill took voluntary retirement in 1994 and then for about 10 years worked as a part time teller in the ANZ followed by a few years as a relief teacher.
I worked at Commonwealth Serum Laboratories for 32 years in various areas such as amino acid analysis, electrophoretic serum fractionation, and research into various venoms from Australian venomous creatures with Struan Sutherland, production of antivenens and antitoxins, and production of quality control material for use as standards in commercial auto analysers, retiring in 1990.
We are now in our early to mid-seventies, have no children and enjoy travelling especially to non main stream countries.
We both play golf (Jill – Kew; Allen – Riversdale) and I enjoy bike riding, skiing (NOT snowboarding!) and tennis.
Jill used to ski and play tennis, but knee replacements have put a stop to those activities.
How did we get involved with GFM?
The circumstances of our joining GFM is rather interesting.
I’m a member at Riversdale Golf Club and was playing at the same time as the GFM Corporate Golf Day was in progress.
Usually, the Corporate people do not offer members a drink from the circulating refreshment cart.
On this day it was different, the cart driven by 2 lovely girls stopped (later to be identified as Mai and Witi) and they offered us refreshments which were gratefully accepted.
Later in the bar, the girls came in and one of my playing group, who, being a ladies man, immediately asked the girls to join us and the conversation started by asking them what firm they were from.
It turned out that they were from GFM and I asked questions about transferring privately held shares into a Super fund.
They said that it would be best if I had an obligation free appointment with their financial advisors to further explore this.
The interview was duly arranged with Paul and to cut a long story short, a strategy to achieve this in the most tax efficient and timely manner was extremely professionally presented. We were impressed with his clarity and deep understanding of the situation and the staging of the strategy to minimise tax implications.
We immediately took up the advice and strategies to affect the transfers and to set up a Self Managed Super fund.
One slight concern we had was the responsibilities of a SMSF trustee seemed to be extremely onerous for a lay person with no schooling in this area. These concerns were conveyed to Paul Nicol, our advisor. He put all our doubts to rest as GFM would handle the technical issues on our behalf. This was a great relief and we have been with them ever since – secure in the knowledge that we are in extremely good and competent hands.
We view GFM predominately as financial planners specialising in Self Managed Super Funds – providing recommendations and dealing with portfolio management. They now offer additional services such as SMSF tax returns etc. which really make it easy for us to operate our SMSF totally in house.
We have always found it a pleasurable experience dealing with the GFM Team as ALL the staff greet their clients by first names and are very familiar with their interest, family etc.
We are completely comfortable with the recommendations we receive either at our annual review or throughout the year as they are well thought out, in our best interests and clearly explained. This stems from the time taken to get to know their clients, their investment objectives, interests and tolerance to risk.
Without this background information, sound financial advice to enable reaching your objectives would be impossible.
The best thing we have experienced as clients is the structuring of our portfolio to provide consistent returns even in depressed markets, which enables capital preservation even after the annual pension draw down.
Our relationship has strengthened over the years as we are secure in the knowledge that we are in good hands. I am able to have a few games of golf together with Paul and Patrick which further strengthens the relationship.
Our advice to those who are in a similar position to us, or family and friends looking for financial advice is to seek specialised financial advice as there are too many pitfalls out there to catch the unwary. We have no hesitation in recommending GFM to family and friends who are in need of financial/superannuation assistance.