Client Profile: Ian & Barbara Gray

Ian has kindly written the article below on his working life, retirement and relationship with GFM Wealth Advisory. We greatly appreciate Ian’s contribution to Trade Secrets.

In 1996 the manufacturing company I worked for as a senior manager was being sold. This presented an opportunity for the management team to make a bid for the company. However, there were a few bumps in the road, namely how to free up various funds to pay for the offer. We received advice to set up a relatively new concept of a Self Managed Superannuation Fund (SMSF). I took this advice to GFM Wealth, and to cut a long story short, my SMSF became the first such Fund in the GFM stable. This started my involvement in the financial markets with stocks and shares, based on advice from GFM. The early years were more about biding time while the company provided dividends which were invested based on GFM’s researched advice and my understanding.

I was a Design Engineer from the Automotive Industry whose career moved up through management and into general industry. Along the way, I studied and eventually gained an MBA. Because of my education and experience, I have enough knowledge to ask the right questions and understand the answers. This is one of the strengths of the GFM team; everything is explained, and any questions I had were confidently answered and backed by competent research. Today I do not have to ask questions as the answers are given as part of our reviews before I need to ask them.

GFM has an excellent system to ensure their advice is tailored to the client’s needs. It starts with an assessment of the client’s risk profile. This may sound a little eyebrow-lifting, but it significantly impacts the type of recommendations made; for example, I am a high-risk investor, and my wife is a low-risk investor, so we are in the middle. We have received advice that meets our risk profile and needs. A second part of the GFM system is planning investments in market segments. Once again, this meant that our investments were tailored to our risk profile, covering as many bases as possible, minimising loss through market segment downturn and maximising in the reverse where another segment is in growth. In theory, I could attempt to achieve these results. However, I have neither the current knowledge nor the resources to carry out such tasks where the changes are continuous and often compounded. With this understanding of the marketplace, I have found GFM to be the perfect partner for my wife and me, where our investments are managed, and we can enjoy the benefits without concern.

I retired some 15 years ago, and my portfolio is bouncing along relatively stable and providing a comfortable retirement, thanks to GFM and the team.

GFM evolved from a few people, maybe as little as four or five, into what it is today and with a philosophy of independence so that the best advice is given without prejudice or bias, something I have admired and respected all along. GFM has built a solid team who runs the same philosophy with the same degree of market research and advice. Would I change anything? No. There might have been slightly better investments, or there certainly was much worse. However, I ended up with better than the industry markers on average for the past 20 years or more. You can’t ask for more than that.

Thank you to the GFM team for the advice and service provided in the past and ongoing into the future.