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The call you've booked is a get to know you call, and we mean that literally. One of our advisers will ring you at the time you chose, and the whole conversation is about you. We'll ask what's happening with your money right now and what prompted you to reach out. Mostly, though, we want to hear what a good life would actually look like for you, because that's where every plan we build starts. Maybe it's retiring at 60 and spending three months a year travelling. Or it might be sleeping properly again because the mortgage finally has a plan around it.

There's nothing to prepare and nothing you have to bring. You won't be quizzed on super balances or asked to justify your spending. The point of the call is to understand your situation well enough to tell you honestly whether advice would help, and whether we're the right people to give it.

No pitch is waiting at the end either. If it looks like advice would genuinely move things forward, we'll explain what a Discovery Appointment involves and what it costs, which is $660 to $990 including GST, the same figures published on our website. The decision after that sits entirely with you. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so on the call and point you somewhere more useful.

Tribeca was built on the idea that a conversation about money shouldn't feel like a transaction. Your call is where you get to test that for yourself. Bring your real questions, even the awkward ones.

It's the right question, so we'll answer it with numbers rather than reassurance.

Our fees are published on our website, which is still unusual for an Australian advice firm. A Discovery Appointment runs $660 to $990 including GST. The Statement of Advice that follows, your full tailored plan, starts from $6,600, and ongoing service starts from $550 a month. You can check every figure before your call, and none of it changes once you're in the room.

So what do you get back? The benchmark we hold ourselves to is called the Value Factor: the goal that our advice returns four to six times what you pay us, in value you can point to. Think tax you were quietly overpaying, or super that's been sitting in a default option for a decade. Add insurance that no longer matches your life, and the debt-versus-invest decisions that have been running on gut feel instead of modelling.

There's independent research behind this as well. Russell Investments puts the value an adviser adds at around 5.9 per cent a year to a client's circumstances, and a good chunk of that comes from behaviour, because the most expensive money mistakes tend to be the ones made in a panic or never made at all.

If the numbers don't stack up for your situation, we'll tell you on your call before you've spent a cent. The Discovery fee only enters the picture if we both agree it's worth going deeper.

That myth stops more Australians getting help than any fee ever has, so let's deal with it properly.

Our client list includes plenty of pre-retirees, and just as many young families juggling a mortgage and school fees. Some people come to us after a divorce or a redundancy. A few have complicated structures and serious wealth, and they're welcome too, but there's no minimum balance anywhere in how we work. The people we help share one thing: a decision that matters is in front of them, and they'd rather not face it alone.

Leah's story says it better than we can. She was widowed with two kids. Her husband's life insurance had lapsed, and there was no Will. About the hardest version of this situation there is. We helped arrange a part payout on the insurance and worked through the estate until she came out the other side debt free. After that we rebuilt her protection and put a proper Will in place. At no point did any of it depend on her being wealthy. What she needed was someone in her corner who knew what order to do things in.

So forget the size of your balance for a moment. The better question is whether good decisions over the next few years would change your life, and for most people who've booked this call the answer is yes. Come as you are.

If you've sat with an adviser before and walked away feeling sold to, this video is worth your two minutes.

Tribeca exists because our founder Ryan Watson got fed up with exactly that. After more than 20 years in the industry he'd seen too much advice that started with a product and worked backwards to the person, so he built a firm that runs the other way. The first thing we ask is what the money is for. For most people the answer comes back to security and freedom, and until we understand your version of that, recommending anything would be guessing.

You'll see it in how the work is done. Your plan is built from your goals using our Financial Wellbeing Matrix and a goal-mapping process called 10-3-Now, which traces where you want to be in ten years back to what has to happen in the next three, and then down to what we work on straight away. Products only enter the picture at the end, as tools serving the plan. Every recommendation lands in a written Statement of Advice with the reasoning and the costs in plain view. Our fee ranges are published on the website, and where an insurance commission applies it's disclosed in that document before you agree to anything.

Nobody on your call has a sales target for the conversation. The only thing worth winning at this stage is your trust, and pushing something you don't need would be the fastest way to lose it.

You could, and plenty of people do. Trouble is, waiting quietly costs you in the meantime.

Most people will happily spend hours planning a four-week holiday, right down to which seat they want on the plane. Retirement is a holiday that runs for twenty years or more, and most of us give it less planning time than a trip to Bali. The strange part is that the twenty-year version rewards early planning far more generously.

Take super as one example. Strategies that do the heavy lifting, like contribution timing and getting the structure right, need years to do their work. Russell Investments' research puts the value of advice at around 5.9 per cent a year, and an edge like that does its best work when it has a decade to compound rather than eighteen months.

Waiting also narrows your choices. Sit down with us at 55 and we can still shape how you get there, from how fast the mortgage comes down to when you can afford to wind back your hours. Arrive at 64 and the conversation is mostly about arranging what already exists.

We're not in the business of scare tactics, and your call carries no obligation in any direction. It just means the conversation you've booked is worth having now rather than in five years. You've already done the hard part by booking it, so keep the time.

Every advice firm says they put people first, so you're entitled to ask what that means in practice.

Start with the framework. Ours is called My Good Life, and it begins with what you want your life to look like, long before anyone mentions a portfolio. The plan that comes out the other side gets pressure-tested with benchmark financial modelling, so your good-life picture rests on real numbers instead of wishful thinking. Plenty of firms talk about goals. We registered the trademark, because the idea runs that deep in how we work.

Then there's the Tribe, which is what we call our team. When you become a client, your plan has a whole team behind it, including an investment committee keeping watch on what your money is actually doing, so nothing depends on one adviser's diary or memory.

And there's the transparency. Our fee ranges sit on the website for anyone to read, which remains rare in Australian advice, and we hold ourselves to the Value Factor, a goal of returning four to six times our fees in value back to you. If you ever want to test whether the advice is paying for itself, the benchmark is in writing.

If you'd like a feel for how we talk about money before your call, look up our podcast, Money and a Good Life. The tagline asks what the F you're waiting for, and that F stands for finances. We promise.

Subject: Your get to know you call is locked in
Send: Day 1, 5 minutes after booking

Thanks for booking your call. The calendar invite should be in your inbox now. If it hasn't landed, check your spam folder, or reply here and we'll resend it.

A quick word on what this call actually is, because "financial advice" can conjure images of a suit sliding a product brochure across the table.

Your call runs about 20 minutes, on the phone or over video, whichever you chose. One of our advisors will ask what's going on in your life, what brought you to us, and what you'd want your money to actually do for you. You can ask us anything in return, including exactly what we charge. Our fees are published on our website, which is rare in this industry, and we're happy to walk through them line by line.

Nothing gets sold on this call. If it looks like we can help, we'll explain what the next step involves and you can take it or leave it. If we can't help, we'll say so and point you somewhere useful.

Between now and then we'll send you a few short notes covering the questions most people sit on before a call like this: whether the fees stack up, what happens if you've left it later than you'd like, and how we actually get paid. Read them or skip them, they're there if you want them.

Speak soon.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: Why people actually book this call
Send: Day 1, evening

A quick follow-up to the confirmation.

Most people will find the time to plan a four-week holiday. Flights compared for days, accommodation reviews read until midnight. Then retirement, which runs 20 years or more, gets a vague "we'll be right" and a super statement that goes straight in the drawer.

The people who book this call are usually somewhere in that gap. Often it's a couple in their 50s or early 60s who have worked hard, paid down most of the house and built a decent super balance without ever sitting down to work out what it all adds up to. They can't say with confidence what their retirement will look like or when they can afford to start it, and that uncertainty has usually been humming away in the background for years.

If that's roughly where you are, the call will feel less like a sales conversation and more like the start of a straight answer. We use benchmark financial modelling to turn your numbers into a concrete picture: what your version of a good retirement costs, and where the gaps are.

You don't need to prepare anything. If you'd like to put faces to names before we speak, the Who we are page on our website lists the whole team, all 29 or so of us. We call ourselves the Tribe, which is about what you'd expect from a firm named Tribeca.

Tomorrow morning we'll cover the question almost everyone asks first: what advice costs, and whether it's worth it.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: What advice costs and what it gives back
Send: Day 2, morning

The first question almost everyone brings to this call is some version of "what does it cost, and is it worth it?"

Fair question. Most advice firms make you sit through two meetings before they'll whisper a number. We publish ours on the website, so you can have them in front of you before we ever speak.

A Discovery Appointment, the structured deep dive that follows your call if you choose to go ahead, is $660 to $990 including GST. A full Statement of Advice starts from $6,600 including GST. Ongoing service starts from $550 a month including GST. The exact figure depends on how complex your situation is, and you'll know your number before you commit to anything.

Now the other half of the question. Independent research from Russell Investments puts the value a financial advisor adds at around 5.9% a year to a client's overall position, through behaviour coaching, tax planning and the dozens of small decisions that compound over a couple of decades. Our own bar sits higher than break-even: we aim to deliver four to six times our fees back in value, and we call that commitment our Value Factor. A fee should have to justify itself, ours included.

If the numbers don't stack up for your situation, we'd rather tell you that on a free call than charge you to find out. That happens, and it's a perfectly good outcome.

Tomorrow: the myth that keeps more people away from advice than any fee ever has.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: Do you need to be rich for this
Send: Day 2, evening

One idea keeps more people away from advice than any fee ever has: the belief that you need to be wealthy before advice is worth having. We wrote an article called "Is financial advice just for the rich?" because we kept hearing it, often from the very people with the most to gain.

The logic runs that advice only makes sense on big balances. In practice the stakes run the other way. A household with a very large balance can absorb a wrong decision. Most households carry the full weight of one, and the big calls, like when to add to super versus the mortgage, or how much cover protects the family if an income stops, land hardest on people in the middle.

Our client base reflects that. We work with young families getting the foundations right through to people rebuilding after a divorce or the loss of a partner, alongside the pre-retirees you'd expect. The reviews on our website are published under real first names through Adviser Ratings, and the word that keeps showing up in them is security, from people at very different starting points.

So your balance is one input among many. What matters on your call is whether we can genuinely improve your position, and if we can't, we'll tell you that plainly and for free.

Tomorrow I want to tell you about a client named Leah, because her story shows what this work actually involves.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: What happened when Leah first called us
Send: Day 3, morning

Leah's story is on our website, so I'm not telling tales out of school.

She came to us after losing her husband. There were two kids, a household to hold together, and a discovery nobody should make in a week like that: his life insurance had been allowed to lapse, and there was no Will.

We got to work on the unglamorous parts. Part of the insurance was paid out despite the lapse. The estate took longer, and we worked it through until it was resolved with no debt remaining. Then we rebuilt the protection around Leah and her kids properly, with current cover and a valid Will, so nothing like it could blindside them again.

The detail worth sitting with is the lapse itself. Somewhere in the busy years a premium notice went unpaid, probably in a week full of school runs and work deadlines, and the family's entire safety net came down to that one piece of admin.

I'm sharing this before your call for a simple reason. Most people arrive expecting to talk about investments and retirement projections, and we will. The questions we'll also ask about insurance and estate documents aren't padding, though. A plan that only works while everything goes right hasn't earned the name.

Prefer to listen? Our podcast Money & a Good Life covered this territory in an episode called Widowed without a Will, with Lahra Carey telling her own story. It's wherever you get your podcasts.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: If you're already managing it yourself
Send: Day 3, midday

Plenty of people who book this call run their own money, and some run it well. DIY is a strength we'd never talk you out of for its own sake.

What tends to be missing is the connection between the parts. Your investments might be humming along while the insurance inside your super is the wrong size for your family, or while your Will still names an executor you haven't spoken to in years. Contribution timing, debt structure, estate documents and the retirement date itself all pull on each other, and a spreadsheet that tracks one of them won't catch a problem in the joints.

That connective work is most of what an advice relationship is. We map where you stand using our Financial Wellbeing Matrix, set goals on a 10-3-Now horizon (ten years out, three years out, and what happens now), and model your numbers against benchmarks so you can see how your position compares. Investment decisions go through an investment committee rather than one person's hunch, and the wider Tribe keeps the moving parts coordinated with your accountant and lawyer where needed.

There's also the part nobody likes admitting: it's hard to coach yourself through a falling market when your own retirement is on the line. Distance is worth something. Your call is a fair way to test whether it's worth something to you.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: The real cost of sorting it later
Send: Day 3, evening

"I'll deal with it closer to retirement" might be the most expensive sentence in Australian personal finance.

Our chairman Brad Fox and I dug into this on our podcast, in an episode called The True Cost of Financial Inaction, because the cost rarely arrives as one visible bill. It shows up as super contributions that could have been made in your highest-earning years and weren't. Insurance gets dearer, or harder to get at all, with every birthday and every new line on your medical file. And compounding can't be bought back later, because its raw material is time.

Put concretely: a plan started at 55 has a decade of contributions and growth ahead of the finish line. The same plan started at 63 is mostly triage.

None of this is a reason to panic, and we'd never manufacture urgency. It simply means the call you've booked is worth more to you now than the same call in five years, and you've already done the part most people put off, which is booking it.

If listening beats reading, the episode is on Money & a Good Life wherever you get your podcasts.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: Will we try to sell you something
Send: Day 4, morning

One question sits under almost every first conversation, even when nobody says it out loud: is this where the product pitch starts?

Worth answering plainly before your call. I started Tribeca after more than two decades in an industry that too often put the product ahead of the person. The idea arrived, of all places, on a walk through the Tribeca neighbourhood in New York, and the firm was built around one test: advice should start from the life you want, with any product entering the picture later, as a tool chosen to do a specific job inside your plan.

How we get paid backs that up. You can read our fee ranges on our website before we ever speak: the Discovery Appointment at $660 to $990 including GST, advice documents from $6,600, ongoing service from $550 a month. Where an insurance product pays a commission, the amount is disclosed in your Statement of Advice before you sign anything. And we hold ourselves to a Value Factor of four to six times our fees, which would be a strange commitment to make if the plan were to clip you on products.

Your call has nothing for sale on it. It runs about 20 minutes, you set the agenda, and the outcome we're after is a straight read on whether we can help.

One final note tomorrow with a few practical pointers before we speak.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: A few notes before your call today
Send: Day 4, 3 hours before the call

Looking forward to speaking today.

You don't need documents. A rough idea of your super balance helps, and your partner's too if they'd like to be part of the plan, since plenty of couples take this call together. Beyond that, the most useful thing you can bring is the honest version of what's on your mind: the question you keep turning over at night, or the thing you've been putting off.

On the call, one of our advisors will ask about your life and what you want from it, then explain how we'd approach your situation and what it would cost, using the fee ranges we've already shared. If it makes sense to keep going, the next step is a Discovery Appointment, and you'll have your exact figure before you decide anything. If it doesn't, you'll leave with a clearer picture than you started with, and that's yours to keep either way.

Need to move the time? Reply to this email and we'll find another slot this week.

Talk soon.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: The longest holiday you'll ever take

Think back to the last proper holiday you planned. You compared flights for a week and read accommodation reviews until midnight, and at least one spreadsheet may have been involved.

Most people will find the time to plan a four-week holiday. Almost nobody puts those hours into planning the 20-year one.

That's what retirement is, when you stop and look at it. A couple retiring in their early 60s can reasonably expect one or both of them to still be going strong 25 years later. The longest holiday of your life, and the average Australian plans it with a super statement skimmed once a year and a vaguely hopeful feeling.

Good planning starts with a picture rather than a product. Sit down with your partner this week and describe an ordinary Tuesday, ten years into retirement. Where are you living, and what does that week actually cost? Most couples discover they've never said it out loud, and that their two private versions don't quite match. That conversation is free, and it does more work than most spreadsheets.

Once the picture exists, the maths turns mechanical: cost that Tuesday honestly and compare it with what your current super trajectory will fund. The gap, if there is one, is a planning problem. Planning problems respond well to time, which is the best argument for looking now, while you still have plenty of it.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: The blind spots in your super statement

A super statement is a strange document. It tells you your balance to the cent and somehow leaves out most of what decides whether that balance will be enough.

The first blind spot is fees written as percentages. A number like 1% reads as almost nothing, but on a $500,000 balance it's $5,000 every year, paid whether the fund performs or not. Work out your fees in dollars once a year. The percentage is designed to feel small; the dollar figure tells the truth.

Next comes the insurance you probably hold inside super without ever choosing it. Default cover gets sized by formula rather than by your actual family, so plenty of people are paying premiums out of their retirement savings for cover too thin to protect anyone, while others are double-insured across two old funds and paying for both. Those premiums come out of your balance, which makes the cost invisible until you go looking.

The third is the beneficiary nomination. Many people assume their super passes under their Will. It usually doesn't; super is paid out by the fund's trustee, and unless you've made a valid binding nomination, the trustee decides who receives it. Binding nominations also commonly lapse after three years, so one made when the kids were small may have quietly expired.

None of this needs an advice relationship to fix. An hour with your latest statement and your fund's website will answer most of it, and you're entitled to ring your fund and ask the rest. The balance gets all the attention, but the fine print is where the surprises live.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: The cashflow rules we teach every client

We do a lot of cashflow coaching, and one pattern has held across the years: we've sat with households on serious incomes who can't find $500 a month, and households on far more modest ones saving a third of everything they earn. Income decides surprisingly little. What the money does in the first 48 hours after payday decides almost everything.

The rules we coach are short.

Pay your future self before anyone else. Savings that wait for the end of the month rarely survive the month. Move money to its destination the day it arrives, automatically, before lifestyle gets a vote.

Give every dollar a job. A single pool of money with no purpose tends to get spent, while the same money split into accounts named for what it's actually for, like the holiday fund or the offset, mostly doesn't. Naming the account turns a vague intention into a thing you'd have to raid.

Review when life changes rather than when the market does. A new job or a new mortgage is the moment to revisit the plan, well before the market hands you a scarier reason.

And spend the planned money without guilt. A budget that allows nothing gets abandoned by March. The whole point of the system is that the dinner out is already accounted for, so you can enjoy it.

Cashflow is where financial wellbeing starts, because knowing the essentials are covered is what buys back sleep. Get the first 48 hours after payday right and most of the rest follows.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: Widowed without a will, and what came next

Leah came to us at one of the worst points of her life. Her husband had died, there were two kids to hold steady, and in the sorting-out that followed she discovered his life insurance had been left to lapse and there was no Will.

What followed wasn't dramatic. We worked to have part of the insurance paid out despite the lapse, then went through the estate piece by piece until it was resolved with no debt left against it. After that we rebuilt the protection around her and her kids, this time with current cover and a valid Will, so the same storm could never hit twice.

The detail that stays with me is the lapse. Somewhere in the busy years a premium notice went unpaid, probably in a week full of school runs and work deadlines, and the family's whole safety net came down to that one piece of admin. Nobody plans for that. The plan is the thing that catches it.

We made a podcast episode in this territory, Widowed without a Will, with Lahra Carey telling her own story on Money & a Good Life. It's a hard listen in places and worth every minute. If there's someone in your life who keeps putting off their Will, this might be the episode to send them.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: What the F are you waiting for

The F stands for finances. We checked.

It's the question behind our podcast, and after more than two decades in advice I can tell you the costliest pattern I see has a name: waiting. Our chairman Brad Fox and I recorded a whole episode on it, The True Cost of Financial Inaction, because the price of doing nothing never arrives as an invoice. It arrives as contributions that were never made in your peak earning years, as cover that was never locked in while you were healthy, and as a low-grade hum of money worry that can run for a decade.

People wait because they're waiting to feel ready. Ready once the renovation is done, or once they finally understand super properly. Readiness rarely turns up on its own, and the people we see thriving in retirement mostly started before they felt qualified to.

So consider this permission. You don't need a perfect filing system or a finished mortgage to take a first step. A few minutes with our Financial Wellbeing Healthcheck on the website counts as a start, and it will give you an honest read on where you stand. So does one frank evening with your partner and a notepad. The podcast is there for the commute if you want company while you think.

Small starts compound. That's rather the whole point of this game.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial

Subject: Is financial advice just for the rich

It comes up at barbecues and on first calls, usually phrased as a polite way of saying "advice probably isn't for people like us."

The belief deserves a real answer rather than a slogan. It dates from an era when advice came bundled with products and was mostly sold to people who already had plenty. The industry earned the reputation, and we've spent 20-plus years working against it.

Now look at the actual maths. Russell Investments research puts the value a financial advisor adds at around 5.9% a year to a client's overall position, across behaviour coaching, tax planning and the timing of big decisions. A percentage doesn't care about the size of your balance. And the stakes often run opposite to the myth: a wealthy household can absorb a wrong decision, while a household in the middle carries the full weight of getting super, insurance or the order of mortgage payments wrong.

That's why we publish our fees on our website, so you can judge the question with real numbers instead of vibes, and why we hold ourselves to a Value Factor of four to six times our fees back in value. If you've been weighing it up for yourself, the simplest way to find out is a get to know you call: free, about 20 minutes by phone or video, with nothing for sale on it. You can book it through the website.

And whether or not you ever call us, do one thing this month: open your super fund's insurance tab and check the cover actually matches your family's situation. That hour is advice-grade value, and it costs nothing.

Ryan Watson
Founder & CEO, Tribeca Financial