Financial Planner

There was a financial virtual learning festival thing done in my country. So I signed up with a financial planner. 

Honestly, I wasn't expecting much.

I had meet financial planners before from bank and it generally wasn't a great experience. The ones I met generally focused on how we wouldn't have enough for retirement or whatever your financial goal is if you only save. 

So they'll always recommend investing. Investing isn't a bad thing. But the thing that always annoys me is that they'll try to sell their unit trust funds. 

It annoys me because 

1) their sales charge is high (but they won't tell you this because this is their commission)

2) they don't know which fund would do well so they can be recommending me a fund that tanks

I'll be honest. I'm a little hard to handle for financial planners.

I'm generally pessimistic. So when people ask me when do I intend to retire, I always answer, I don't intend to retire. I'm realistic enough to admit that there's a possibility that I am not able to retire because I can't afford it. 

But of course, if they make me choose a random age, I give a generic age such as 65 years old.

But this financial planner that was paired to me this time was someone that wasn't pushing a product. 

She really was looking from my financial perspectives.

I was relatively honest with her and my financial health is relatively healthy. 

I told her that I had a budget.

But sometimes I kept to it and other times, I failed.

I also told her that, sometimes living like this was stressful.

I think I told her that because I was coming from a stressful moment. Yea, sometimes keeping to a budget is stressful especially when my budget is a lean budget and doesn't allow space for birthday presents for friends or any extra occasionally expenses. So if I spent on those kind of stuff in that month, it would be hard and stressful to keep to the budget for that month.

She asked me what was my financial goal.

Was it buying a house? I said no.

In the end, I just said, I wanted to be able to spend freely without much guilt. 

I guess in a way, what I wanted was, financial freedom.

She suggested that maybe I tried the envelope system for finances. 

I think I'll look into that. 

I guess it was just nice having a financial planner that wasn't completely only interested in her commission.