Cian Carolan

You're listening to the Irish Times.

Hi, Aideen.

How are you?

Correct.

Yeah, there's no... I know you're going to say it depends.

I won't say what you think I'm going to say, right?

So I'll start with, okay, different motivations, okay?

So if someone came to me, let's say they have a good emergency fund, they've got some good disposable income, but they're really underfunded from a retirement perspective.

I might say to them, listen, why don't we dial up the pension contributions a little bit here because you're not putting enough in at the minute.

rather than you don't be debt free in your mid 50s with no pension or a very minimal pension pot.

And then you might come across someone who's already max funding their pension.

So that kind of ticks that box very quickly.

And then you might say, OK, you've a lot of money in the bank.

You've no long term investment plans at the minute.

And maybe that might be a motivator as well.

You might talk about, well, the opportunity cost of paying down your mortgage versus the opportunity that you're leaving behind by not investing.

And then you might find someone's already investing or they, but some people just have a really strong motivation to being debt free early.

And as financial advisors, it's really important for us to lean in to what the motivations are rather than telling people what,

we think they should do and it'd be a carte blanche advice to everybody so it's really like we've two ears and one mouth yeah and and that's how we that that's where good advisors come through is we listen we hear and we lean into those motivations because also if someone's really motivated by something they're more likely to stick to it true okay and it's better better to pay overpay your mortgage than let your money sit in the bank gathering very little interest right so

How do you go about doing it?