Financial Planning – Greg Fok Advisory

Who owns my wealth?

September 29, 2024
by Gregory Fok

I am going to be attending and facilitating a programme called, God, Money and Me.

It looks into the intricate relationship we have with our lives, our wealth and ourselves. I love to read into the connection between each other as it tells us a history of ourselves and how we can live our life moving forward.

As I started reading some of the materials, it reminds me strongly that all that I have is not owned by me, but by the one who made me. I am only a steward temporarily for this period.

When we are a steward, wealth does not belong to us, but we become responsible for what we are tasked with at that time.

For example, if we drive a car that belongs to a mentor, we tend to be much more responsible to ensure we return the car clean, and we drive it very carefully etc.

So when it comes to wealth management, when we are stewards to take care of it for others, we learn to be more careful and yet wise around it, to ensure that it will live beyond the current means and allow it to last longer as well.

It takes a different shift in mindset about ownership and responsibility and stewardship.

Does it make help shift some perspectives?

You can have something more than Elon Musk!

August 22, 2024
by Gregory Fok

How is it possible to have more than Elon Musk?

Everyone would have thought that Elon Musk has “everything”.

I was speaking to my mentor some years ago, and he shared these wise words with me.

💡 “If you can’t be happy with $1mil, you will not be happy even if you have $5mil. And if are happy with $1mil, giving you another $5mil will not make much difference in your life.

Gratitude and faith is something that I am trying to constantly grapple with especially in the context of the work I do.

🎯 I talk about money and business to people all day long and I have also noticed that the very successful people in life, are those who are “hugely contented”! And they usually are those who do not have the most.

As the readings for today says, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

🧨 Such a powerful paragraph. Not too long ago, I was thinking about “upgrading” our home to a more “valuable” home (because my home is 99yrs), according to the excuse I gave myself. I still have lots more to grow in this aspect and I am still struggling to understand this. But this is a great reminder for me to stay grounded, to remain humble, to be contented at where I am. But to grow in my mindset, my purpose, my spirituality, to grow in my faith.

☀️ So the next time if you are thinking if you “want more”, ask what is the purpose.

Wouldn’t you like to simplify your financial life?

May 22, 2024May 22, 2024
by Gregory Fok

Which would you prefer? The journey on top or below?

You are getting one year closer to retirement than you think. You realize that as you grow older, you have more assets.

When you get more senior and wiser, the following happens…

🧨 You want to reduce your risks.
So one of your ways of diversifying is to split your investments into various stocks, funds, pools of types of assets. Maybe you even start to invest overseas.

🧨 Managing larger amounts of wealth.
The skill-set of investing small amounts of wealth vs the skill-set of managing larger amounts is very different.

🧨 Your life becomes more complex
Because of the above 2 reasons, your life becomes more complex due to the need to spread your investments around. There are some people we work with who have even lost track of what they have with age and time.

💡You will come to a stage when you want to SIMPLIFY your life. Especially if suddenly, health changes or if someone else is going to take over what you have. The likelihood of them being able to appreciate all your efforts and work of your lifetime is going to go down the drain.

We help you to consolidate and have a clearer picture of what you have. So that your family can have a clear picture of where you stand and know the strategies to execute in a SIMPLE way, but yet still reduce your risks and increase your expected returns, while giving you and your family peace of mind, with less anxiety.

Which would you prefer? The journey on top or below? The choice is yours.

If you like to find out more how we do it to help families and businesses get to financial freedom, follow my posts and reach out for a copy of our PROCESS or we can have an initial meeting at our cost, with no obligations.

♥️This take a PROCESS to plan, to TRANSFORM with a rewirement programme. And I can tell you it takes time. It takes effort to Unlearn to Relearn.

My name is Greg and if there is someone who would like to transform, multiply their life, their business, their wealth, with PURPOSE, and have time for themselves, with less anxiety, pls feel free to share or reach out to me and repost too! I would sincerely appreciate it!

Work hard, and then, work smart!

April 30, 2024
by Gregory Fok

Most of us are told to work hard. I was told by my Mum to rely on pure grit and strength to get ahead to success in life.

We should all work hard, especially early in our lives. Once we have built some stability and fundamentals, it will be time to work smart.

I was speaking to a couple who were trying to impart the values of hard work to their child. And I added, the next step is to work smart. Let your existing resources, assets and income work for you.

And then after a while, it becomes a cycle of it’s own, without you needing to interfere in between. The cycle of growth and re-growth continues as long as one plans well.

So with the recent case, just by reallocating their existing assets, they have managed to increase their value by an extra $2mil using OPM (Other people’s Money)!

If you know someone who would like to find out how to be more creative by increasing their experience and wealth, let me know and we can have an initial meeting at our cost, with no obligations.

Be a mustard seed!

February 7, 2024
by Gregory Fok

When I first started in my practice 19yrs ago, it was all about achieving success to show the world that I am better.

While that approach worked well for the initial years, while I was trying to gain credibility, it soon tapered off after a while. The sense of satisfaction of achieving the awards no longer seemed to mean as much to me as time progressed.

⏩Instead, what was something that had driven me was the ability to make a change in someone’s life. Of course, the financial impact mattered. One of the clients we worked with had a big challenge when it came to saving any money. But when we recently reviewed her portfolio, she has almost $600k we had built over time! And she was quite impressed with herself!

What was even more interesting was a recent case when I told him to stop worrying about the short term noise in the market. He used to be a stock picker who looked at the markets and news all the time. His eyes were fixed on the prices of the companies.

💥Nowadays, he says that he is so freed up of all the short term noise. He knows he would have held the most valuable companies, most profitable, on a global basis of 15,000 stocks. And it was rebalanced on a daily basis. If the company had run up in price too much, there would be a system to sell part of it, to find other more valuable companies. So there was nothing to track for him and that saved him at least 365 hours every year and re-gained back his mental energy which he had put into exercise and time with his family. And best of all, the wealth will take care of the higher increase.

♥️So if we can be that mustard seed, to help a person grow, TRANSFORM a person’s life, for the better in terms of his wealth, and his LIFE, his business, his fitness, his renewed energy, his outlook, we know we have made that little difference!

How would you like to transform your life in 2024?

A painful lesson of my life.

November 29, 2023November 29, 2023
by Gregory Fok

March 2009…

I was away for a holiday in March 2009, at the depth of the financial crisis. I had sat through one of the biggest downturns of the markets and my emotions and mood was swinging up and down with the market conditions.

I told myself that there seems to be enough blood with the red in investments in the streets. I will want to avoid the emotions so I will wait till I get back from my holidays before I decide to buy more stocks again.

When I got back a few weeks later, the stocks I had wanted to buy had gone up by at least 15%!

So I thought to wait for it to come down before I decide to buy again. The prices soared and never came back down to those previous levels. I had missed the boat. In the recent years, some of these same stocks have actually been delisted!

💥 Lesson learnt : It is so hard to time the markets or pick stocks, especially over a prolonged period of time.

🤓What is the solution?
And so now, I use a systematic process that helps me and my clients have more purposeful living, increased peace of mind, better relationships, reduced risks, have more time for yourself, simplify your life and still get higher returns!

When you have a solid process for decision making made at the beginning, you get to your goals more easily.

Do you agree?

My name is Greg and if there is someone who would appreciate and read my posts and insights, pls feel free to share with them and me and help to repost too!

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How do we make investment decisions?

June 28, 2023June 28, 2023
by Gregory Fok

Someone shared with me a “stock tip”. I did some research and believed so much into it and made the decision to buy..!

If you are like me and most people I know, it starts with someone in a social gathering sharing a “stock tip A” and someone believing so much into it.

Then we decide to do some research and extend our belief by finding the data and details to solidify our decision of why this single stock A is worth investing into.

We do the same over time and then accumulate many “Stocks” with no coherent value of decision making but all based on someone else’s story. And even then, we will be worried to put too much into one stock for fear of an idiosyncratic risk of a single company disappearing like “Wirecard”.

When we have more spare cash, we adopt this same model over and over until we realize that we have many stocks and funds that are all over the place. What markets become volatile, which do we sell and buy?

What about the companies that are unheard of, that we might never have heard about of the Apple’s, Tesla’s and Nvidia’s in the early stage. By the time the names come to the public view, typically their valuations have grown to become fairly lofty. But the other question is how many of these small companies grow to become giants in the industry?

💥Does this decision making process make sense?

Well, I previously used this strategy and I can share with you that this does not get me to my big long term goals which need to be sustainable over decades of investment periods into my retirement years which may last 4-5 decades.

So I needed a better way to plan and invest.

Instead, what we do is to help you to reframe the process the other way. Start with your BLUEPRINT of your plan like constructing a building!

💡We go through a process. We start by asking you what your goals are, how much time you have, understand risks of markets, reframe our mental models towards uncertainty, bring confidence through planning before we even decide what asset allocation to use.

What has been your experience and is there a better way you would suggest to bring greater confidence and reduced risks?

Live rich, not die rich!

May 17, 2023May 17, 2023
by Gregory Fok

Some people are concerned about running out of money. There will be others who eventually will have more than enough money for themselves and end up leaving behind too much money.

For those who are retired or close to retirement, you want to reduce the outcome of either running out of money too early or constantly saving and leaving too much money and die rich.

What we do is to help with cashflow planning in your retirement so that you will end up living a rich life now and not die rich.

Maybe it is to take more holiday trips, maybe it is to help with kids in their own families, maybe it is to give more to charity, maybe it is for grandchildren’s education, maybe it is to drive the car for another 10yrs, maybe it is to have a live in helper to ease your routine work load to have a better lifestyle, maybe it is to take a sabattical to explore what is next, maybe it is to help a friend, maybe it is to start a business.

We try to understand what about the value of money that is most important to you in your life, so that you can be able to put that into the cashflow planning. This allows you to see when you might run out of money with Monte Carlo simulation. And if we can do that for you to live a better life and still have sufficient funds to leave behind, wouldn’t that be something that will be a better outcome for everyone?

Find out what is most important to you in your life in the value of money and we plan ahead with you..

Don’t you want to design your best life to live a rich life?

Do you know someone who has a joint loan…

April 7, 2023April 7, 2023
by Gregory Fok

If you do, are you aware that your business partner’s liability now or future, may accidentally become yours?

It is quite common for business partners or doctors, dentists to come together either purchase a clinic, property or start a business or buy medical equipment together. That usually might be the case because on an individual basis, you might not be able to afford buying the clinic, the shophouse, property or come up with capital to run the business. or you basically thought to share the risks with someone else.

So when you do that, you sign the loan off on 2 accounts, once on behalf of the company and the other as a personal guarantor. It might not seem like a big issue at first, but did you know that your partner’s liability can suddenly become yours?

I feel sorry for the innocent parties, however, this case study listed below will have given us a glimpse into understanding that unexpected liabilities that might come about.

A wife bought a landed property together with the husband with a mortgage loan of USD$1.94mil at the beginning. Her husband subsequently, on his own (without the spouse), went on to take on business loans of USD$131mil.

So most people would assume that is the husband’s liability on his own. It is not.

Suddenly, when the husband was unable to pay off the debt, that USD$131mil debt now falls to the spouse as well, on top of the USD$1.94mil loan. (Manifold Times | Wife of Coastal Oil’s Tan Sing Hwa saddled with debt to the tune of USD 131 million)

We help businesses exit smart at the highest multiples, so that you can manage your wealth well.

If you know someone who has taken a joint loan with a partner, it might be time to reassess the financial implications and obligations it might have on you or your family. These scenarios can be planned in advance to be prevented so that the risks does not fall on your friend’s lap.

Never make an investment decision if you feel rushed!

January 24, 2023January 24, 2023
by Gregory Fok

Our emotions drive our behaviour and our behaviour drives our decisions.

When you are upset and emotionally charged, you cannot think clearly and make unwise decisions.

When you feel joy, you feel secured and you make wise choices.

I thought that I was very calm and knowledgeable, especially given that I speak about this daily with the work I do.

However, during the depths of the market in 2008 and 2009, I remembered that I was rushing to buy and sell KeppelCorp (where my wife was working at) and any news about it brought the feelings of greed and anxiety at the same time. As the investment amount grew larger, the emotional roller coaster got stronger.

In the end, I was left with a bad investment experience and bad outcome.

Those of you who had some experience of trying to trade stocks will know what I am talking about.

There are much better ways to invest and get you to your best life with peace of mind using CORE strategies!