Client Case Study: A Family With Two Doctors

Kyith Ng

Patricia has always wanted to find someone to help her make sense of her family’s finances so that she can be a good steward of the family wealth.

Originally, she and her husband, Stanley, came to us to learn how we help our clients invest their money to bring them closer to their life and financial goals.

Stanley has spent the past 18 years building up a private medical practice. Patricia was a medical doctor as well but made a tough decision to sacrifice her career seven years ago as life for the family of 5 got very hectic when Stanley’s private medical practice took off.

Since the business income from Stanley’s medical practice is adequate to support the family, both felt that their children are very important to them and they would like one of them to spend more time with the children during their growing up years.

However, Stanley’s life is very much pre-occupied by his business. He must ensure that his staff is running the operations well, on top of ensuring that he takes good care of his clients.

With such a hectic life, management of the household is left mainly to Patricia. This would include not just children but also their finances.

As they both earn a good income, they have managed to accumulate good net worth.

Majority of the net worth is in their properties. However, Patricia is always on the lookout for investments with good returns.

Managing wealth is not something that comes easy to her.

She has this impression that to build wealth, it is to allocate their money into investments that have high returns. Aside from their properties, the solutions provided by the banks have been rather hit and miss.

During our discovery session with Patricia, she revealed that her inability to manage their money well puts a lot of strain on her. She feels guilty for not being able to deliver when the family has entrusted this responsibility upon her.

Both Patricia and Stanley work in a profession where solutions can be administered only after thorough thought-process and testing. Yet, when it comes to investing, they always wonder why can’t things be more evidence-based?

While they watch out for the interest of their patients at work, they have a challenging time finding someone who watches out for their interest when it comes to wealth management.

Stanley told us during their 45-day review that the greatest benefit of engaging us to help plan their finances is how much more relaxed Patricia is nowadays.

They have also benefited from certain areas of planning which they were not aware they require.

Being in a profession where they understand the value of professional advice, they can see the benefits of paying a fee for a personal Chief Financial Officer (CFO) to get conflict-free advice in return:

  1. Balance their immediate spending needs with financial goals in the future
  2. Advice on how to structure their wealth so that it can be passed down in a sensible manner
  3. Should something untoward happen to one of them (or both), they have someone trustworthy to work with their immediate family to continue to steward their wealth
  4. The financial markets evolve from time to time, they want someone competent and trusted to help risk coach and advise them whether they should be doing something or whether they should be ignoring what they hear
  5. Someone who understands their responsibility to donate money to their community, to work out how much they could confidently donate and not jeopardize their other financial goals

At Providend, we take time to work with you, our client, to plan this out.

The process takes time because we are trying to create a sound financial setup so that you can live the life you want.

This is an original article written by Kyith Ng, Senior Solutions Specialist at Providend, Singapore’s Fee-only Wealth Advisory Firm.


We do not charge a fee at the first consultation meeting. If you would like an honest second opinion on your current investment portfolio, financial and/or retirement plan, make an appointment with us today.

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