If you work with a financial advisor, it always helps to remember what they exist for. A financial advisor exists to help you with your financial circumstances and decisions – whatever they may be. It may seem strange to state that, but sometimes the clients of financial advisers don’t want to tell their financial advisors about their financial decisions, circumstances, or more specifically financial “opportunities” they’ve been offered. Financial advisers eventually do hear about those “opportunities”, but unfortunately for the client, only sometime after the client has acted on that opportunity – the time when it’s too late to get…

Last year the independent senator from South Australia, Nick Xenophon raised a loopy idea that has long been an obsession of the real estate industry. Let first home buyers raid their superannuation to buy a house. It didn’t grab a great deal of attention and it attracted mostly criticism. Given Xenophon enjoys an occasional populist thought bubble and lacks the ability to carry such a proposal through to legislation, it soon died off – until recently. With the federal Liberal government struggling in the polls there have been some notable backflips and populist ideas emerging. Xenophon’s superannuation raid for homes…