Hub Southern Cross member Corey Wastle is the founder of Verse Wealth, offering financial coaching and advice, helping their clients change their perspectives about money and finances as well as planning and creating strategies for their future savings and goals.
Hub Australia spoke to Corey about the changes in financial coaching and advice and what is essential to help people reorganise their financial life.
Everything we do at Verse Wealth is uniquely personal.
We don’t give anyone advice on anything until we know who they are, what they value, what’s driving them in life. What goals and priorities connected to those values?
“We want to buy a home. We want to start a family. We want to start a business. We want to travel every year. We want to travel for 12 months. We want to leave this legacy. We want to do this for our kids.”
There are goals you strategically work towards and challenges to overcome financially, either practically or emotionally.
It could be, “I worry about money and what we spend. I’ve got bad spending habits and credit card debt. I’ve got no money behind me. My partner and I have different financial plans.”
There are many reasons people aren’t feeling good about their finances. They’re worried and quite often not making the kind of progress they hoped for.
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Before we give anyone advice, we understand all those things, in a lot of detail, and then use that as a reference point.
Financial Strategy
Everyone needs a combination of strategy and coaching.
Strategy is, “Let’s invest here. Let’s put money into super. Let’s do this. Let’s save tax this way.”
Those are the things people instinctively think about when they’re getting financial advice.
Financial Coaching
The other element is financial coaching, managing their behaviors and mindsets, making them better decision makers, keeping them accountable and helping them acknowledge what’s holding them back.
We go into difficult conversations with them.
Financial advice definitely involves emotional labor, and there’s an art to it.
That’s something financial advice traditionally hasn’t done for people – it’s been sales and product-orientated. There’s value in strategy, but it’s undermined if people don’t have the right mindset, awareness, and decision-making behaviors.
Those have to be in place for our strategies to help people reach their goals – we’ve had so many people come to us who have received advice for years but they’re still stressed about money because they’ve had narrow, focused advice that hasn’t addressed them as individuals.
A lot of people come to us online after doing research, and we’ve made sure they can get a sense of who we are, our values and beliefs, what our intent is, and how we work with them before they first get in touch.
It gives them a chance to filter themselves in or out to a degree.
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Fighting Fears
There is skepticism out there from the perception of the industry – some people have had negative experiences, and I think that’s a shame because so many people need advice.
It’s scary for people too.
Money’s one of those taboo things because people don’t talk about it with anyone, sometimes even their spouse. I think a lot of people have fears and anxieties built into their money and how they’re managing it, and people can feel vulnerable reaching out to a financial advisor.
Over time, we’re becoming a far more progressive society, and at some point, those walls around money are going to come down.
For now, the stigma is something getting in the way for some people, and they can feel like their ego’s dented if they need to reach out to get help.
Part of Verse Wealth’s role is finding a way to make that easier for people, and we’re working to help as many people as possible learn more about how to make their finances work for them.