These are unprecedented times—we have never experienced anything like what we’re going through now and we understand that some of you will be anxious about your investments and about how any reduction in value will affect your future lifestyle and ability to realise your dreams.
During times like this, you can rely on us to keep a calm and steady ship in stormy waters and especially to provide reassurance, so that you can tune out the short term noise and concentrate on the long term benefits of sticking to your financial plan and investing for your future.
Two of the most valuable commodities in a crisis are comfort and perspective and it’s important to help you put the current volatility and uncertainty into context.
Have a look at the illustration below and think about how each graph makes you feel: worse, uneasy, or better.
Now consider the same graphs below, with the time frames showing when those markets occurred. Does this make you think differently? The short term view definitely looks much worse than the longer term because currently we are in the middle of a crisis and perhaps we are allowing our emotions to get the better of us so we are not thinking rationally.
The message is that when we look at the wrong things at the wrong time with the wrong rationale, we eliminate the perspective we need to move forward and be productive. We experience volatility internally—emotions can range from irrational exuberance to outright panic.
Helping you to put things into perspective is one of our most valuable contributions towards helping you to make sound financial decisions, not just now but in the future.
Volatility and uncertainty generally appear in five areas:
- Events in the world
- Markets
- Messages
- Emotions
- Relationships
At the moment, I think we can all admit to feeling volatility and uncertainty in most—if not all of these areas—to varying degrees. We know that our clients are looking for relevance and reassurance and anything we say to you must be directly related to your current personal needs.
Now that everyone’s world has been turned upside down, it is important to take a step back and reassess how you are doing, what you are feeling and what support you need from us at Magenta.
We know that you will be feeling worried, uncertain, and anxious about your health, your family, and your future, as indeed are we. Almost everyone is looking for some stress relief, peace of mind and any advice that will help to simplify their financial life—and life in general. What can we do to help better?
Because most people don’t take the time to organise their financial affairs, they spend their lives with a little black cloud of financial or investment stress following them around. Right now, that cloud has grown into a major storm. That’s where we can help! Here are some guidelines for helping you to simplify your life:
- We can help you to see the big picture using your lifetime cashflow forecast. Even after any falls in the value of your investment, we can demonstrate whether you are still on track for a comfortable and happy future.
- We can therefore help you to understand what it will take to reach your goals, even given the current circumstances.
- Details matter: we can help you to gather your information and then organise things in the simplest way possible.
- We can ensure that if the worst should happen, all the loose ends have been tied up and legal matters taken care of.
- We promise to make things easy to understand and to be there when you need us most.
- Let us know if there is anything else we can do to remove stress from your life.
We understand that you want to know you can rely on us and that our value to you is what we can do to help take you from where you are now to where you want to be in the future. It is important that we both know that we are still on the same path, that we understand what you are concerned about and can address those concerns. Do please let us know if you are worried, if your plans have changed and/or your circumstances significantly altered.
We are in uncharted waters and you are understandably concerned about what will happen next, so our focus is on your personal welfare and the security of your hard-won plans.
We will remain calm, strong and accessible, if ever your plans need to be adjusted or your expectations modified we will let you know and work with you towards any changed goals or dreams – and we won’t be afraid to deliver bad news if necessary because we know that this too will pass.
With all that is going on, we wanted to let you know that we know how you feel and that we are all here for you – remember, our job is all about helping you live the best life possible with the resources you have. We are working together for your future security, happiness and the ability to pursue your passions. We can expedite the journey between the reality we are currently dealing with and the place you have always dreamed of being.