We first got to know Joanne when she came to my company to do a financial talk “$100 to $1mil” around 6-7 years ago. We got a copy of her first book “Money Lessons from the Wild” which she wrote for young kids and teenagers using animal stories to illustrate financial concepts. We were very amazed and impressed that she managed to achieve financial freedom at such a young age of 30. We wanted to achieve financial freedom for our family too. We have 3 kids and we wanted to have a proper financial plan with multi streams of income. However, the previous financial consultants we met were mostly recommending investment products that were not too suitable and were not performing to our expectation.
When we did our portfolio review, Joanne patiently looked through all our policies and recommended the actions to be taken to enhance the coverage with consideration to our overall financial ratios. We took up her recommendations to enhance our insurance coverage and we embarked on retirement and investment planning using her “Private ATM model.” She helped us to identify the “Pay-cheques” and “Play-cheques” and helped us to construct a portfolio of equities, bonds and alternative investments with high Sharpe ratio and Sortino ratio. We used to try to invest on our own but we barely have time due to our work schedules and having to take care of the children. We lack the understanding of financial markets to do the investments on our own. The investments that she helped us to curate has grown tremendously and she is always more concerned about the risk reward ratios as she focuses on the investments that can have lower volatility than the market, and yet outperform when markets are down and recover faster when markets are up. We entrust our savings to her as she has the competency, temperament, skills and ability to manage the portfolios for us.
Her love for our kids and concern for the financial literacy of the next generation has led her to do coaching and mentoring. During covid, Joanne did talks and some activities over zoom and taught them about Mindset, Money Management, Budgeting, Mentoring, Risk management through a series of games and activities. This helped them to grasp financial concepts to prepare for the challenges ahead. She also helped us to do our wills and estate planning to ensure that we have a multigenerational plan that is robust and resilient in tough market conditions so that our kids will not be in lack or inherit the wealth when they are too young or immature to manage the funds.
We are very grateful to have her as our financial advisor and we hope to continue this relationship through to our next few generations. She listens to our needs and helps us to fulfill our goals. It is a privilege to be able to work with her and her team as they are very prompt with their responses and they have been able to exceed our expectations and overdeliver on our retirement planning.