Our Focus, Difference, Origins & Why we exist.

Focus

• Strategiq Wealth only works with a select group of people. It focuses on working with people who are typically up to 15 years from retirement who are serious about working alongside a professional that does proper financial planning, built on a foundation of goals and strategy. This focus was born out of our frustration of seeing people getting closer to retirement that weren’t maximising all the opportunities available to them. This was holding them back from achieving, and then living the good life in retirement. 

• Today, we are a money management and financial advice company that helps people set up a clear pathway to take them from where they are today to exactly where they want to be.

• To deliver the results our clients' desire, we developed the Retire Well Blueprint that provides the framework for helping clients get on the right path to their ideal retirement. It was designed to give them a 10 level of confidence that regardless of markets, the economy, or the world, they will achieve their goals.

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Difference

• Strategiq Wealth is not your normal financial planning firm. It was established to be a force for good in personal financial advice. Our clients can obtain high quality independent advice that is not polluted by conflicts of interest, focused only on helping clients achieve their goals. We have no association with product providers, refuse to accept commissions, charge only flat fees, and we certainly do not force all clients into the same products to provide efficiency benefits for the advisory firm.  There is no high-cost cookie-cutter solutions, cleverly disguised as bespoke solutions, that are commonly practiced by most firms in Australia.

 

Origins & Why We Exist

• Strategiq Wealth was founded by Craig Meathrel. He is a Certified Financial Planner and a practising member of the Profession of Independent Financial Advisers. Since 2005 he has been working as a Retirement Strategist and has become an expert with helping people over 50 who want to live the good life in retirement.

• Craig is one of less than 60 financial advisers nationwide to be granted membership of the Profession of Independent Financial Advisers, the peak ethics-based financial planning association in Australia. Craig is also a Certified Financial Planner, accredited by the Financial Planning Association of Australia. In 2016 he won the ipac/Burkett Award for Excellence. 

• Craig became a financial planner in 2004, soon after returning from volunteering in Ghana, West Africa. He decided then that he wanted to work in a profession where he could have a positive impact on others. Financial planning stood out as having the potential to do that. Unfortunately, he was disappointed to find that it wasn’t as client centric as the ideal vision that financial planning offered. It wasn’t a profession at all, but an industry of people taking commissions and pushing people into certain products that they could help manage and take a percentage-based fee. Even small firms that portrayed the image of being independent weren’t doing the right thing. While this has improved in recent years (only due to government intervention), most financial planning in Australia falls well behind the ideal.

• While Craig prefers to focus on looking after clients rather than creating businesses, he ultimately decided that the only way to do the right thing was to start a firm that was built on the values he felt should be the basis of an ideal financial planning firm. In simple terms, a firm that gave the kind of financial advice you would give a treasured person in your life; simple and effective; built on strategy, not products; designed to achieve the life goals of clients, not anyone else’s objectives.

• Having worked with hundreds of clients over many years, Craig found he had a passion for working with people getting closer to retirement. Especially those people who wanted certainty about how well they will live in retirement.