Relax...It's Just A Financial Advisor

Sure, they talk about out-of-this-world things like “mutual funds,” “annuities,” “peso-cost averaging” but really, financial advisors ain’t that scary. Nor do they mean to cause death-by-nosebleed.

In fact, they come in peace. And with a serious mission: To help as many Pinoys (yes, us in this third world country) achieve financial freedom and stability.

I know the fight or flight instinct is very strong in us right-brain creative types when it comes to finance folks (the tailored suit and the sometimes unnatural speech can be frightful and alienating, indeed, but bear with them as they do know something pretty important and useful that most of us don't.) 

So when someone introduces herself to you as a financial advisor, please contain the urge to run away screaming. I encourage you, instead, to take a deep breath and to stay put. Think happy thoughts, if you need to. You'll discover, as I have, that when you hear them out with a relaxed, open mind, much of what they have to say actually makes a lot of sense.

In fact, when received with the right attitude, financial advisors can be our most passionate enablers. Our dreams' biggest fans. Our supportive mothers on steroids.

Want to open your own bookshop and cafe?

Start your film production company?

Set up that foundation?

Purchase your beach house/bed-and-breakfast?

Take that trip to the Mediterranean?

Sustain your advocacy?

Finally write that novel?

Or just take a year off to figure out what you want to do next?

Aaand still pay rent or the mortgage, send the kids to college, care for your aging parents, and prepare for your Second Act (known to most—but not you--as “retirement”)?

Well, these folks are trained to create the financial roadmap to help us get from where we are to where we want to be. 

We all know that we need to get ourselves, our families, our companies, our communities on the road to sustainable financial freedom and security. Often, though, we don’t know where or how to begin. (Kasi naman, hello, it’s not taught in our schools, unless you’re a business or economics major).

Well, I didn’t know how or where to begin. That is, until I decided to take Martiani or Martian-language classes (yes, nose bleedy at the beginning, but OK lang, guys. Kaya, kayaaaa…) to mine the treasures of that world—the financial world--and to make financial literacy (simply put, money smarts) work for me.

I really hope you can make it work for you, too. Be proactive and do your own research. Find out which companies offer financial planning services and which ones are reputed to do it well. Usually, the longer a company has been providing that service, the sturdier and more trustworthy it is. 

Then you can actually invite the "alien" over for coffee or tea. You might find out how much more interesting life on Earth can be.

Right, Gertie? :) 

Here's the Plan, Stan

It’s personal, of course—my becoming a rabid financial planning advocate for creative types.

As a writer, I am such a type. So are all my four younger siblings—an author/magazine editor, a chef/photographer, a painter/graphic designer, an illustrator/fashion stylist/production designer.

So, too, are many of my closest friends: film directors, copywriters, creative directors, art directors, cinematographers, poets, painters, editors, yoga teachers, musicians, entrepreneurs…The so-called right-brainers—creative, artistic, empathetic. Financially illiterate.  

After seeing many of these talented and gifted folks fall into debt, fall into depression because they weren’t making the movies they wanted to do, anxiously await the next project (or the next paycheck from the last freelance gig) and when in God’s name it was coming because their rent was three months overdue, work in patayan and kayod-kabayo fashion yet still barely make ends meet, earn P500,000 or so a month yet still can’t afford to take a much-needed year-long sabbatical, reluctantly ask for help from colleagues because they’ve been stricken by a critical illness and they have little or no savings nor medical/health insurance, I was, like, Shiyyyet.

I myself had gotten into debt for having the bright idea to self-publish my second book and for producing my third short film (flying in the entire Manila-based crew to Boracay, hello). Did I adequately plan for any of these passion projects? Noooo. Why not? I don’t knowww. It wasn’t taught in school or at home…?

What I do know is that this epidemic of grossly unsound money management and lack of financial foresight among creatives needs to stop.

Which is why I went into the financial services industry for a while--to learn and to teach to my kind the skill of smart money management. Otherwise known as Financial Planning.

Sure, it sounds fancy and rather scary (say it, Fffffinancial Planning), but all it means is identifying our goals and then figuring out how long and how much it’ll take us to get from where we are now to where we want to be.

Financial Planning is simply making the decision to see your dreams so clearly, to practically smell and touch and taste them, that you can already do concrete things today to move you closer to realizing these dreams, instead of leaving them up to the Fates.

I am convinced that if creative people learn the skill of financial planning, they will be unstoppable. They will themselves become producers, publishers, patrons/patronesses of the arts, philanthropists, investors in their colleagues’ work instead of waiting for the moneyed folks to hire them for the next uninspired, trite and, honestly, dumb project or idea.

Instead of bitching about the client who hasn’t paid them or whining that the government doesn’t support the arts enough, they will be making things happen (and I don’t mean burning down the client’s building or bombing Malacañang—tantalizing to some, but no. ‘Wag tayo ‘jan, guys. Not nice.)

They will channel their energy into more productive things: They will be creating world-class work.

While I originally wanted to be a financial planner for myself and for the people in the arts/creative industry, I was once again reminded in the course of this work—talking to people about their dreams—that there are people who don’t hold jobs that say “creative” and yet are actually so much more creative than those who have so-called creative jobs.

“Creative” is not a job—it’s a state of mind, “a way of showing up in the world,” as one guru put it. You can be an accountant, a lawyer, a software engineer—jobs that are categorized as  left-brained; that is, logical, linear, by-the-numbers--and yet you are actively and consciously shaping the life you’ve imagined for yourself, are waking up everyday excited by the full awareness that it is one day nearer to where you want to be. You are creating the one thing worth creating—the life you want to have, the life of your dreams. That is what it means to be creative.

The poet M.C. Richards couldn’t have put this sentiment more eloquently: “All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.”

Whether your goal is to build that “green” home (airy and awash with natural light to conserve energy), send your kids to the best universities, retire/live on interest comfortably at 60, create an annual travel fund, protect the money you’ve already made and ensure that the government doesn’t rob your heirs of what’s rightfully theirs, afford to take a year or two off to write the novel (or produce the film or volunteer in Tacloban or build that foundation) or all that and more, I urge you to get some serious money smarts. Now. Not later. 

Learn how to make your moolah become the solid, tangible foundation for your biggest dreams and your most towering aspirations. Today. Not tomorrow.  

I’ll sign off with this quote from our pal Pablo (yes, Picasso): “Our goals can only be reached through the vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.”

So get crackin' and start plannin'. 

Live long and prosper, guys! :) 

Your ally and enabler,

Tweet

Financial Freedom = Creative Freedom

If you were to stop working today for whatever reason (you’re burned out, you got sick/had an accident and need to recuperate, you lost/quit your job, you have no new freelance gig lined up, etc.) how many months will you be able to afford your (and, if you are the breadwinner, your family’s) current lifestyle—pay rent/mortgage, food, gasoline/transportation, utilities, entertainment, cell phone/Internet bills, tuition fees, etc.—before you have to go back and earn a living again?

Put another way:

*If the money—your income--stops coming in today, how long do you have before your stash runs out?

If your answer is somewhere between three to six months, congratulations! You have an Emergency Fund. Which means you have three to six months to not panic because you have that little window to look for a new freelance project, get well or find a new job.

If your answer is between a year to three years—at the least--GOOD JOB! You have what I call a Short-Term Art Fund (or Passion Project Fund). This means you can afford a certain degree of creative freedom – you can take a year to two and a half years off from having to make money/earn a living in order to focus on a creative/personal project. (The remaining six months is for finding a new gig, regular or freelance, to replenish your used up savings.) Without having to worry about how you will survive financially and feed yourself and your family for a year to two and a half years, you can:

…Write that book you’ve been meaning to write

…Rethink your painting style and discover a new one

…Take that yoga teacher training course

…Do more research and rewrite your screenplay

…Produce your own film (take a break from being a director for hire)

…Start your social enterprise

…Home-school your little kids (shape and properly equip them before the world gets to them)

…Go on that literary/artistic/spiritual pilgrimage to Paris/Florence/Bhutan

…Enroll in that culinary class

…Study Shakespeare for a year

…Put up that dance studio

…Apprentice with a creative idol/mentor

…Or just travel, discover new things to get inspired again and perhaps figure out what you want to do next.  

Now, if you have enough cash (or assets that can be converted to cash without trouble) stashed away to last you between 30 years and the rest of your life, then, by GOLLY, you have that very rare thing called a Long-Term or Sustainable Art Fund. In the financial world, it’s called Financial Freedom. But they both mean the same thing: You have the freedom to keep creating the things you imagined, to keep making the art that calls to you, to keep contributing your authentic, uncompromised voice in making this world a better place, until you croak.

You see, I know what it’s like to want to make something and not be able to… because of a lack of funds. That was how it was for me for a good portion of my creative life. Until I got tired of living that way and decided that, surely, there must be a smarter, more efficient way, to do this whole creative thing.

Not only did I get ahold of a financial advisor, I actually went and trained to be one. The best way to learn something is to teach it, right?  

So here's what I learned: A good financial advisor/planner will sit down with you and map out a strategy for reaching your goals. Meaning, she will help you compute how long and how much it would take to get to where you want to be. And then she advises you on what you can do NOW—with what you already have (no matter how “small” you think it is)--to start getting there.

You do not pay the financial advisor for this service. At least, not the way you would pay a lawyer or a doctor or a shrink—which is, for their time and how much their standard fees are, which varies from lawyer to lawyer and from doctor to doctor. It’s just the way the current financial services industry in the Philippines is set up.

In the Philippines, most financial planners are connected to financial institutions—banks, insurance companies, investment houses, etc.—and it is these companies that pay the financial planners. 

As a society, we’re not yet as sophisticated as other countries in terms of financial savvy/literacy, so most of us won’t hire a financial planner. The market for one is not yet big enough for many independent financial planning careers to thrive. Seriously planning our financial life, sadly, is still at the bottom of most Filipinos’ priority list. We’re still kind of in the day-to-day, bahala-na-si-Batman mindset when it comes to managing our money.

But sound money management (and I am fully aware how much like the parents we didn’t listen to I sound like)—which involves mindfulness, accountability, delayed gratification and foresight--is a vital, empowering skill to learn and to share with our loved ones, especially with the next generation.

I’ve learned, from 19 years of being a working creative, that if you want a sustainable creative life—if you are in love with and excited by birthing new ideas and long for a life that is authentically productive, joyful and meaningful—then you must have financial freedom. Because financial freedom is creative freedom. If you aren’t financially free, then it must be your utmost priority to plot your freedom.

The books you see proudly plastered on this site are products of my being in a financially comfortable place—I didn’t have to think of where I was going to get the money to pay for rent, food, utilities, etc. In order to have the peace of mind to focus on my first book, I had enough savings to last me all of two months. It didn’t even qualify as an Emergency Fund, let alone a Short-Term Art Fund. But I didn’t know it then. For me, any amount of cash that could buy me my freedom from having to work for money (take on a full-time job or a freelance gig) even for just a short while was a Writing/Art Fund. Deadma na kung short-term or long-term.

So, with my two months’ worth of financial/creative freedom, I wrote like a maniac for a solid month. Didn’t leave my apartment. Didn’t see people. And had to survive on Tapa King delivery for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The second month was spent editing, preparing for the book launch and scrambling for a new regular job.

As you can imagine, I kinda, sorta got sick because of that. I vowed I would never do that to myself again.

So for my next book, I played it smarter (and, to be honest, shameless): I asked my parents to take me back. I moved out of my apartment and into my old room at my parents’ house and stayed there for three rent-free years. Kapal ng mukha, yes. But absolutely necessary, if I valued my sanity. Which I thankfully did. I had become ill, in about every aspect of my life, and the only real remedy that I saw was to focus on writing and completing my second book. (I am one of those people, by the way, who firmly believes that not creating/expressing oneself is the root cause of most illnesses.)

After that, it made sense for me to go and get some serious financial planning education and create a Short-Term Art Fund and then a Long-Term Art Fund (or get a writing grant—which is next to nonexistent in this country) so that I wouldn’t have to move back to my parents’ house again to write my third book.

I know that, like me, you have dreams other than providing the necessities and the material luxuries for yourself and your family. The objective of this blog is to affirm and encourage you to hold on to and to keep sacred those dreams. It will make you very sick and very restless and very miserable and very old (than your age) if you don’t.

I want you to have the dream house, the car/s, the nice vacations and trips abroad, the good schools for the kids, the financial capacity to support your aging/retired parents, the financial safety net for yourself and your loved ones in case something happens to you or to them--all without sacrificing your creative life.

In other words, I want you to keep making astig things (films, books, paintings, businesses, etc.) without making yourself and your loved ones poor and miserable like many many creatives that have come before us. And I want you to keep doing so for the rest of your natural life. :)

Live long and prosper, people! :) 

Your ally and enabler,

Tweet

The Art Fund (Or Why I Went Into the Financial Services Industry)

When I told my brother I was training to be a financial advisor, his reply was blunt: “Yo, ‘teng, you’re gonna lose all your friends.”

So it was under the black cloud of my brother’s fearless forecast that I bit the bullet and began the year 2014 by writing to friends and family announcing my new and rather unusual incarnation...in order to pave the way for an idea I wanted to pitch to them: The Art Fund. 

As in, a fund they set aside specifically for the purpose of creating--of making beautiful (and maybe not-so-beautiful) things--in peace, with the blissful knowledge that all their daily survival needs--food, rent, etc.--have already been taken care of.

The need for such a fund seems obvious, yes, especially if you desire a sustainable creative life. But in reality--meaning, in practice--it's actually not that obvious.  

Otherwise, I--and many other people I know in creative fields--would not have subconsciously perpetuated that long-standing cliché of the financially-impaired artist. 

In other words, if the idea of having my own Art Fund were that crystal clear to me, if my brain were naturally wired to think that way, I wouldn't have gone into major debt for my creative projects.  

When we talk of creative freedom, it's often in relation to censorship--that is, to an external agency blocking the dissemination of our work, silencing us, keeping us from freely expressing ourselves. But what I've come to realize is that the biggest threats to our creativity are within us, not without. One of them is our stubborn insistence on remaining--how do I put this?--dumb about money. 

Unfortunately, many of us still harbor the notion that we are somehow purer, our art more authentic and untarnished, when we keep ourselves ignorant about the currency with which the physical world, of which we are a part, operates. But there is no bliss in that kind of ignorance.  

The truth is that there can be no real and sustainable creative freedom unless we achieve financial freedom.  Artists can only keep producing astig work if they’re free from constantly thinking of when their next rent money will arrive. (Lalo na pag may anak—your art, even your own survival needs, take a backseat to the little ones’ needs.)

I also realized that the reason I wasn’t very smart about money then is that no one in the financial world (accountants, bankers, stock brokers, insurance agents), it seemed, knew how to talk to someone like me about money in a way that took my concerns into consideration. No one seemed to understand that I wasn’t really that interested in saving or investing so that I could buy a car or a house or to send my kids to school (because, um, I don’t have kids). 

I do want to buy a (beach) house and to send my kids to school (when I am blessed with them already). But the truth is, if I was to save and invest, it was so that I could:

1) Not have to take a job or stay in one I didn’t like 

2) Afford to take months off from “earning a living” and focus on a book or screenplay that I was writing 

3) Afford to have my own space, where I could create in peace 

4) Afford to go to a nice beach or travel to a new place to renew my spirit 

5) Afford to take my loved ones along to that nice beach and new place to renew their spirit 

6) Afford to play patroness of the arts to a friend or family member whose soul has become parched because he/she hasn’t been doing his/her art, to say to him/her, “Enough wishing, whining and worrying. Quit your job/leave your parents’ house/take a break from being breadwinner. Instead, work on that book/painting/play/film/new fashion line/dream boutique hotel/whatever. I got your back…for six months to a year.”

But the money folks weren’t talking to me about all that. So I wasn’t really motivated to learn early on to save, invest or get insurance (well, I let mine lapse when I went freelance).

It seemed logical, then, that the thing to do was to get some money smarts myself and to be my own financial advisor.  When I learned enough, I figured, I would be a financial advisor for people like me. So that younger creatives, who include my own siblings, cousins and friends, could get it right soonest...and be rid of that oh-so-annoying money-related, dualistic and ultimately self-sabotaging artist cliché of being either “starving” (creative na walang pera) or a “sell-out” (creative na may pera). 

So that artists and art in this country can truly thrive, as they do in First World countries.

After a year of "training" and of trying to sell the idea of the Art Fund, I am happy to report that I did not lose any friends. At least, not to my knowledge. I firmly and truly believe that many of them honestly changed phone numbers and simply lost mine in the confusion...

The lovely surprise was that I found a warm, comfortable home in what was once a truly alien world to me--the "grown-up" world of personal financial management. Sure, I was the weird one, at first. The one who seemed to have wandered into the wrong building. The one whose standard response to everything they said was a look of confusion and a highly articulate "Huh?" 

But, my golly, were those people--my mentors, my colleagues, my fellow trainees--endowed with uncommon patience. Not only did they take me in, they seriously took me on, rolling up their sleeves and gritting their teeth as they rewired my brain so that it could receive new and vital information that would help further my cause, my creativity, my goddamn Art Fund. They did not give up on me--a feat and a kindness I laud to this day as I know very well what a tough crowd my kind can be.  

So that when it came time for me to write again, to leave that world and to return to mine, I left knowing that that whole invaluable experience afforded me a real fighting chance, as that wise pointy-eared alien with the killer brows put it, to "live long and prosper."