Survivor: Let’s play – Big (Financial Planning) Brother

In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s winter. Yes, it’s that season of the year that funeral directors will tell you, is a good time of the year.

There’s nothing quite like a brisk cold snap to send a few of your older clients off to the great Centrelink queue in the sky.

I know one funeral director who gets his casuals on stand by once the weather bureau predicts night time temperatures of five degrees or less. He’s particularly happy with business in his Mt Hotham and Kosciusko branches.

“It’s great — by the time you get to them, they’re well… prepared, let’s say,” he says. “It means we save money on electricity and they’re much easier to handle. Sometimes we stack vertically.”

Me, I’m not such a fan of winter. Winter means short days, long dresses, no barbeques and clients with plenty of time on their hands. NEVER give a client spare time. Time to read stuff sent to them by fund managers. Particularly the end-of-year statements which, once again, provide in detailed commentary how efficiently and professionally they lost money.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only difference between a good fund manager and a bad fund manager is that the bad ones lose your money faster — which could be a good thing, if you think about it. It’s painful, but it’s over and done with.

Nonetheless, I’m all for a bit of truth and honesty. The opening paragraph in the letter from the MD should read:

“Your funds have fallen because the assets the fund invested in on your behalf have fallen in value. Importantly, ours didn’t. We slashed our staffing costs during the period and the development costs of our IT rollout in the 1990s have now been fully recovered. We also stopped giving planners cool pens, golf balls, wine and stupid little squeezy stress things.”

When you’re not slashing your wrists in winter, you can once again turn to the telly and receive valuable insights on how the rich and famous have made their money.

Now, I’ve been studying the telly of late and while I was delighted that Reggie ‘Hanson’ won ‘Big Non-Gender specific Sibling’ (how bizarre is that, two fish and chip proprietors in two different decades with identical intelligence and articulation skills, both end up in the limelight after a popular vote?). I figured that we could do a little better in the financial planning community.

It would work something like this. You could have David Knott as Big Sibling doing the evictions. All the fund managers get locked up in the house together.

The only problem is that within two weeks, and after a few quiet whispers, they’d all have taken over each other.

We could send in intruders.

We could have an agro old pensioner waving her brolly in one hand, while swinging her AMP share scrip around in the other. I can just see Andrew Mohl being pursued between the pool and the barbeque with ‘Myrtle’ throwing empty Crownies screaming: “What about my F*#@ing shares, what about my F*#@ing shares?”

Chris ‘Right Place, Right Time’ Cuffy could provide the prize money — let’s face it, he should have a bit left to spare — and Orgasmia, or whatever Tower has changed its name to, could sponsor the house itself.

You start the show off with a whole pile of sacrificial BDMs who get evicted unless they arrive in the house with a whole pile of goodies like umbrellas and bottles of red.

The planners get to do the evicting. You get one vote for each time a fund manager makes a stuff-up — except for the people who use ING or MLC. These will have to be discounted by 80 per cent or otherwise they would swamp the polls.

Whenever there’s an eviction, the evictee gets to lodge an appeal with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), sues every bastard that’s ever spoken about them and gets let back in. That way the show will never end.

Of course, if making money being in a perv show is not for you, there’s always the property shows. These are great. Get a dump of a place, cover it in weirdly coloured contact plastic wrap, line up a few dummy bidders and show how you can jack up a price 20 per cent over fair value.

Our version, of course, would be called ‘Hot Fund Manager’. Same idea though. Get some crappy asset covered in a kind of wrap, stick it on the market when the hype’s happening and see what happens. Makes for a different type of dummy bidder though — these ones get the assets.

Of course, the other pastime you can turn your mind to is deciding whether to change direction in your business. For example, you might consider a career in grief counselling given your recent experience or perhaps, move into ‘lifestyle planning’.

I’ve given this serious thought over the past few months and have always believed that anything I am about to subject my clients to should be road-tested on myself. It was an interesting process and while I won’t bore you with the details, the recommendations went something like this:

Dear Mr Bruining,

We have analysed your lifestyle in depth and make the following observations and comments.

1. We would like to join you each night of the week in your‘Celebration of Life, World Tour 2003’, except for Sunday when you‘have a spell’.

2. We have considered your personal habits, social activities and lifestyle and conclude that you should spend like buggery. Mr Bruining, there seems little point in saving for anything in the future beyond September.

3. Can we have your Grange when you are gone?

4. Have you considered sleeping in a vertical position, particularly if attending the Victorian snow fields?