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Sheila Cabacungan is a Western Sydney small business owner. She is a licenced financial planner. Sheila’s business is 13 years old and is focused on Western Sydney small business owners. She aims to deliver financial education, helping her clients be financially literate to generate the funds that allow them to live well.
Financial planning is about advising people on what to do with their money and generating funds from their business. The first step is to get the business to the point it is financially sustainable. The second step is to build wealth for the owners.
Sheila is raised in Western Sydney as part of a “big, loud, proud Philipino family” and has a big beating heart for the area. She was raised in Blacktown and the areas out to the Nepean and Hawkesbury.
Sheila sits on the community radio SWR 99.9 FM board and hosts a weekly show on Wednesday evenings about money, life and business.
Sheila is passionate about financial planning because people are structured around the money we need to secure the skills, time, energy and attention. If you want your efforts to result in living your best, “Oprah Winfrey style” life, then you need to master the money game and master yourself.
The last three years have managed to get people focused on their financial well-being but also exposed our lack of education and capability in this area. The key sources of stress and mental health issues can be linked to the human relationships we have with financial health.
Most of the energy people exert to get up each day and head off to a place of work or a business to generate the funds required to sustain our life. The changes to work practices during the pandemic have meant people have questioned what they are doing. People have reassessed how they work and why they work. “Do I need to spend an hour commuting each day each way?”
It is an exciting and challenging time to be in business. Our businesses need to be the engines that generate the cash flow so that our employees and our personal goals can be realised.
When making a major life-changing decision involving money, it is not the logical part of your brain that is driving the decisions; behavioural money coaching is based on cognitive behavioural therapy and focuses on helping individuals make more grounded decisions.
Which part of your personality is making the various money decisions?
Once people start making informed decisions, the decisions stick and are personal, and investment resilience increases.
The range of clients is varied. Many business owners have realised that having a financial plan broadens their business options. In some cases, trade businesses like electricians realise that the business structure can resemble a professional services business, including partners and various stakeholders.
Many of the changes are being driven by the younger generations, who are revisiting the whole work/life paradigm.
Being a business owner means you should be able to control your calendar – when you work and play.
Younger professionals are looking at how to integrate work and life. This contrast with the mythical work/life balance. How is my work contributing to the world I want to build?
Skills, time and energy must be aligned between the employee and the employer. Outside the compulsory requirements like super, salary and a safe work environment, there is a lot of flexibility in how an employer negotiates the work environment.
If a business has employees with a productivity target and not just a time spent target, then the business could be in better shape. At the older end of the workforce, what are the succession plans? This includes the founder’s exit.
Summary:
People: how do you turn up in the world? What do you think about money? How rational are your decisions?
Who do you want to be? What is the contribution you want to make?
Don’t get stuck on well-established paradigms that don’t necessarily work anymore.
When you know what it is that you want to do, everything else will fall into place; you can make things happen. Get clarity!