We are fee-based. We are remunerated primarily through fees paid by clients to us. This means greater objectivity and professionalism.

Commission-based. Clients are obligated to buy products. There is no objectivity and totally unprofessional.

For investment, we use Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) when possible because active managed funds are inferior in performance due to its high fees.

Do not recommend ETFs because it pays no commission. Those who are commission-based recommend unit trusts and ILPs which are usually active managed funds.

Only recommend simple products such as fixed deposits, ETFs, etc.

Recommend dangerous products such as structured notes, hedge funds, landbanking, wine, etc because these pay large commissions.

For insurance, able to assist and help clients to select appropriate company’s group insurance. Also, we tend to recommend term insurance and disability income for needs that are temporarily in nature.

Do not advice their clients to buy group insurance because it pays no commission. Others dislike term insurance and disability income insurance as the commissions are low despite its affordability.

We focus on wholistic planning rather than narrowly focus on insurance and investments. Other areas we focus on are: tax planning, credit management, retirement planning, children’s education and estate planning.

Others like to dwell too much in these two areas because commissions are earned from the sale of these products.

We believe clients need to take some level of responsibility in their own financial well-being. We do not believe they should “outsource” all their planning to others. Therefore, we will insist clients to take charge some of their financial matters such as transacting on their own after we have made the various recommendations.

Others insist that their clients transact through them (nevermind they do have the best products) because they could only earn a commission for the transaction.

The Retainer Service allows us to provide on-going advice to my clients on all matters of their financial well-being. We prefer to be transparent in the manner we deal with clients.

Other advisers could embed these on-going fees into the products they recommend without their clients knowing.

Able to recommend a wholistic estate plan and execute the plan.

Estate planning is used as an opener to sell more insurance rather than focusing on wealth distribution. Not professional and very unethical way of doing business.

Nothing is cast hard in stone and a regular review and changes are required.

Abandon their clients after making the sale. If they do “review” their clients situation, it is to sell another insurance.

Because nothing is cast hard in stone, we avoid long lock-in regular premium investment strategy. By using ETFs, the client can also liquidate or switch anytime without exit penalty.

Some other advisers like to recommend long lock-in regular premium investment products on the premise of providing the client a discipline way of investing. The real reason is because these lock-in investment products give huge commissions for the adviser typically about 100% of the annualized premium.

We approach investment management from a portfolio point of view. More specifically, “portfolio” to we includes the client’s wealth like CPF balances, fixed deposits, property, SRS balance, etc. We prefer not to departmentalize an “education portfolio” or a “retirement portfolio.” The client’s entire asset is the portfolio.

Unprofessional advisers approach using artificially departmentalized portfolio such as “children’s education”, “retirement portfolio”.

We subscribe to the belief that it is important to be debt free as soon as possible. Thus, we would like clients to pay off their mortgage loan as soon as possible.

Financial planning isn’t merely about hard figures. The value attached to being debt free is a priceless intangible that only a truly debt free person will appreciate. We believe that it is not prudent to invest using borrowed money.

Some practitioners argued that if the borrowed money can be invested at a higher rate than the mortgage interest, why the need to pay off the loan so soon since it does not improve one’s networth? Some subscribe to this belief because they earn a commission refinancing your property.

We only work with clients who are genuine and sincere and are appreciative of the concept of Comprehensive Financial Planning.

Hard-up to take in any clients as long as they can sell something.

We put client’s interest above the company. Due to running our own business practice, we own our clienteles and so it is important to provide good service. The company does not own the clienteles.

The company owns the clienteles. Advisers do not own them and so have no motivation to provide good after sales service.

But we also are not ashamed to ensure that we are paid fairly for service rendered. We believe to put client’s interest first means that we must remain in business as long as possible. Therefore, we do not claim to provide free advice.

Claim to provide “free advice”.

To test whether our recommendations are truly unbiased, we will always ask ourselves whether these recommendations will be acceptable to us if we are in our clients’ shoes.

Advisers do not even believe in the products they are selling.

I will only recommend regulated products. These products must either be regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) or regulated in jurisdictions that have a greater regulatory standard than the MAS. I will not recommend unregulated products regardless of how “good” they are.

No hesitation to recommend products even if it is unregulated.

We diversify clients’ assets and insurances with different companies because you never know which will be the next to fail.

Only recommend their own company’s products.

We prefer to work with a limited number of clients rather than finding new ones. This to ensure minimum quality of service for each client.  We desire to work with clients on a long-term basis and remunerated through an on-going retainer service fee.

Keep on looking for new clients because earnings are based on commissions for new sales. Not able to provide any on-going support for existing clients because there is just too many.

We cannot work with clients who are too busy. We believe clients are ultimately responsible for their own financial well being. It is not acceptable to us to have clients with no time even to meet or discuss their own financial matters.

Advisers are able to meet their clients even at 12am in the morning on weekends.