Having a Qualification Doesn't Make You Qualified

4 days. That is how long it took me to become legally qualified to advise you about your money. I walked out of that room with a license, but no extra knowledge or understanding on what to actually do when someone is sitting in front of me. I want to take you back to a time when I first got started involved in the investment industry. When I, after I bought my very first piece of real estate, I decided, do you know what? I want to get involved in the real estate industry. And I thought, well, the first thing I need to do is I need to go get a qualification, right? And so I went out and I got my real estate license. When I got that real estate license, I was sitting there with these dreams and thinking about, well, I'm going to learn all this stuff about structuring a multimillion-dollar investment portfolio. I'm going to learn about due diligence. I'm going to learn about site selection. And my goodness, wasn't I sorely disappointed? All I learned about was how to fill out contracts, how to tick some boxes, how to stay within some regulations. And what was even scarier is that when I got my first job in real estate, There were 17 agents in that one office I got started at in Gold Coast. And do you know what? Only one of them had an investment property. And that was when I realised I was in the wrong room. Later on, I needed to become a financial advisor, qualified financial advisor, because I was teaching people how to trade options and trade shares, and I had to get the qualification to be able to legally be able to do that. 4 days later, I had my financial planning certificate. That's not even the scariest part. I did it via distance education with an open book exam where I was simply copying my answers and pasting them into the questions. And then I became a qualified financial advisor. Again, what it taught me was that the real learning isn't done when you get a qualification. And what it really taught me is that qualifications do not mean qualified to help you grow your wealth. That gives me permission to get involved in the market, but it didn't teach me the capability to be able to grow my own portfolio and help others. When I became a mortgage broker, 'cause I spoke about more financing in real estate all the time, I got that done in literally half a day on a weekend. And again, didn't learn anything about advanced structuring when it comes to finance or anything on helping an investor be able to grow a multimillion dollar portfolio. The real learning that I got was when I actually got into the workforce myself. I was actively building my own portfolio and seeing the journey of thousands of investors over the years how they're growing and expanding their portfolio from the places they get stuck, but also the places where they tend to win. And I've got to tell you, some of the biggest learnings were the key places where I absolutely stuffed up and stuffed up hard to the point of losing everything because I didn't strategize and structure my finances and my investment portfolio correctly from word go. Now, don't get me wrong, there are incredible financial advisors and incredible real estate agents that know a heck of a lot about their craft, but there are also some terrible ones. But this is exactly It's exactly the same in every single industry. The trick is, how do you find the right people that you want to choose to be on your team? And the number one moniker I want you to remember is that it's results over qualification. When I'm sitting down thinking about, well, someone I want to bring on my team to be able to support me as part of my wealth team or to be able to work with my investors, the first questions I'm asking is, well, tell me about your own investment philosophy. Tell me about your existing portfolio. Where are you winning? Where are you stuffing up? What are you optimizing for right now? And if they can't tell me any of those questions, I'm done. They are not the right person. Along my journey, I've worked with a lot of accountants and advisors and financial planners and real estate agents. And I got to tell you, and this is a little bit of a dirty secret about the industry, a lot of them have no portfolios. They're not building their own wealth. The vast majority in my experience, unfortunately not. It's just a job for them. Now, I want to share with you a bit of a personal story about a family member that this has impacted in a big, big way. Very recently, My dad handed over his portfolio for me to have a bit of a look at. For many, many years now, he's just trusted a single financial advisor to take care of things because he thought that that was the way to go. Now, in the meantime, his son's been doing this for 20-odd years. But hey, parents can be funny sometimes. And my parents were people that would never really talk about money or talk about investing. It was a very taboo topic to actually talk about. Once he handed this portfolio over to me, after he was telling me that, oh, I feel like my financial advisor's not doing a good job. He's charging me $5,000 every year, but nothing's changed. Changed in the portfolio for a long, long time. I just told him, Dad, like, give me the copy of this stuff. Let me have a proper look at it. When I got the piece of paper and the portfolio in front of me, I was horrified. And quite honestly, I was really pissed off. I felt like my father had just been taken advantage of and advantaged of for years. Nothing had changed in the portfolio for the last 6 to 7-odd years. No adjustments, no fine-tuning, literally nothing. Every year the financial advisor was collecting his fees but was not advising in any way, shape, or form. If the portfolio was humming and just growing beautifully and doing well, no problems, happy days. Don't touch something that's actually working. Unfortunately for my father, his portfolio was not. There were 6 of the 10 positions had gone backwards over the last 10 years. Some of the positions there, they'd made— and when I say backwards, that not beating inflation. Some of the positions, 2 of them had gone backwards by 30 to 40% completely. Some of the other positions had only made you know, 1.9% per annum growth over the last 10 years. And add a bit of dividends in there, maybe they were making 4.5%. Again, with inflation, this is literally going backwards. I can imagine exactly what happened. My dad came along, the financial planner interviewed them and said, are you a conservative investor? Are you a moderate investor? Are you a growth investor? He shoved it into this magical machine, spat out this cookie-cutter portfolio, and then go, Dad, go do that. And go put this into action. And that's probably what has happened. And now as I'm looking at the portfolio, we're going to start rejigging and start changing in a big way to actually get his money working hard. And unfortunately for that financial planner, he's no longer going to be doing the advising of my father because this is where a lot of it goes wrong. It just becomes a cookie-cutter approach to building a portfolio. Again, there are incredible financial advisors. I know a bunch of them. But then there are some Who— where it's just another number and just a way to be able to attract a commission out of. Next week, I want to show you why the people that this system seems to keep producing gets one thing really critical wrong about you, and that is very simply, you do not have an income problem.