Like many of us, Tony Lu has been indelibly shaped by the example set by his parents.
And when it comes to his work ethic, this is especially so.
Lu’s parents were Vietnamese refugees who landed in Sydney with very little money in their pockets.
Lu’s mum sewed clothes for a living, while his dad worked as a machinist cutting metal.
“They worked really hard so I could have the opportunities they didn’t have,” Lu says. “They were blue-collar workers who hoped I would become a white-collar worker. Both my parents respected money because they had to work so hard to pay the bills.”
On the career front, Lu has undoubtedly left them proud. While he didn’t know what he wanted to do when he left school, he got a bachelor of information systems degree anyway.
“I didn’t particularly like computers, but I was good at maths,” he notes.
It wasn’t long into his IT career, however, that he realised he wasn’t in the right field.
“I was working in IT for a private education provider and I would wake up not really excited to be going to work that day,” he says. “I knew it wasn’t the right field for me.”
Lu quit his job and started to study for his CFP, obtaining some work in a call centre while he gained his qualification.
He decided to enter the planning industry because of some early success he had with property.
“When I was a very young man in my early 20s, my parents encouraged me and helped me to buy a property,” he says. “I remember selling it for quite a bit more some years later and being impressed by how much it had grown in price.
“It made me realise how these investments can make a difference and I wanted to do that for other people.”
Lu has been a planner for close to 16 years now, and says he has formed solid relationships with his clients, and sometimes with their children.
“A lot of our clients are wealth accumulators, in that they earn between $100,000 and $500,000 a year, but often they don’t have an opportunity to learn about finances, so I try to educate them to ensure they’re making the right choices,” he says. “There are still couples who are earning $500,000 between them, but have credit-card debts and are going backwards.
“Sometimes, the more you have, the more you spend, so it’s about teaching that discipline. It’s like keeping fit. We know it’s just about eating right and working out, but how many of us are truly happy with our fitness levels?”
Being good with money is a skill that is going to become increasingly important in coming years, Lu argues.
“I don’t think we can rely on a pension system forever. I don’t think people will be able to rely on the government in the future,” Lu says.
Lu is also not a fan of allowing young people to access their super in order to enter the housing market.
“The only reason a lot of people even have superannuation is because their employer is obliged to pay them a certain amount of money they cannot touch,” he says. “If I had of been allowed to access my super and I had, say, a child on the way, then it would have been very difficult not to access it.
“Plus, I think in the short term it would make housing more expensive because there would be more people with significant deposits competing for property.
“I think younger people need to find other ways into the market.”
| Tony Lu
Name of firm: Announcer Financial Planning Time in the industry (previous jobs?): 12 years with Announcer; three years with ING prior to joining Announcer Academic qualifications: Certified Financial Planner, advanced diploma of financial services, bachelor of information systems Accreditations: CFP Professional association memberships: Financial Planning Association of Australia Other memberships: Most Trusted Advisers Network |
