Client Profile: Tony & Jenny Watson

Tony and Jenny have kindly written the article below on their family, working life, retirement and the relationship they have had with our company since 2002. We greatly appreciate their contribution to Trade Secrets.
We have been GFM Wealth Advisory clients now for 13 years, since September 2002.
I am 65 and Jenny is 64 years of age.
I was a Graphic Artist for 32 years, a career that started in London and, for the most part, I was self–employed. Jenny worked part–time as a Laboratory Assistant for a Herb and Spice Company and spent much of her time bringing up our two children. I was working long hours and didn’t spend a lot of time at home. My son wanted to be a stock broker (because they drove Porsche cars) so he did “work experience” while at high school with Potter Warburg. This got us started on the share investment trail. I even went to share investment classes at night at the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). So instead of buying flash cars, we invested in the share market very early.
By 2004 our children had grown up and left the nest. The Graphic Industry Technology was racing past me, so we decided to do a big SEA–CHANGE and bought a 30 year old business in Seaford. This was definitely out of our comfort zone as we were dealing with “tradies”. We put the business on the web to create a second store and we enjoyed the next six years working hard before selling the business at the end of 2010. The store/factory was extremely good business but there is only two times in life NOW and TOO LATE and we did not want to leave retirement too late. I would like to mention two fantastic GFM clients who helped us at this time: Frank Clark, who came in with his big picture accounting skills and Colin Falso for his website skills. Paul Nicol (my adviser at GFM) was there also during these years and saved us a lot of tax.
How did we become clients of GFM? I was fortunate during my Graphic Art days to have a large client in the field of Superannuation and Financial Advice who taught us to put money away in Superannuation. In 2002, this client sold to a larger National company based interstate. So Jenny and I went shopping for a replacement. Terry Buscombe, already a GFM client, referred us to have a meeting with GFM. We could feel the ambience, that there was a “strong back bone” of staff. We had no hesitation in moving to GFM.
Everybody knows how professional the GFM staff are and we really appreciate their advice. They are all incredibly smart and very good at what they do. We are extremely pleased with the pro–active advice and service that GFM provide. Proof of this, is that we have referred eight couples, who are now happy clients of GFM. We would not have done this if we were not comfortable with the performance of GFM.
We are now in the self–funded pension phase and enjoying being grandparents to 3 lovely granddaughters. We like to travel a lot, play golf, spend time with friends – we are living the retirement dream.