Imagine if you walked into your financial planner’s office and he asked you if you were happy? You’d probably be taken aback, but as Arun Abey explains to Jennifer Crocker, finding out what makes you happy is the first step to financial peace of mind.

Human beings have a complex and complicated relationship with money. We think that if we have tons of it we will automatically be happy and we’re glad to take financial advice from the random stranger sitting next to us at a dinner party, but Arun Abey, co-founder and strategic adviser to acsis, has news for you.

“We think that if we won the lottery we would be happy, but research has shown that lottery winners don’t end up happy,” says Abey. “Money is not a short-cut to happiness, but it can play a direct and significant role in providing happiness when it helps us live in a way that is consistent with our personal values and goals.”

“The first step towards financial security is finding out what makes you happy,” says Abey, who is in South Africa to launch his book ‘How Much is Enough?’.

Sound lifestyle financial planning is a subject the author, who graduated with a first class degree in Arts and Economics from the Australian National University, is passionate about.

And the seeds of his revolutionary approach to financial planning lie in part in the time he has spent in Africa ‘watching the animals on the savannah’ and learning about how we have evolved. “Our ancestors used their ‘Ancestral Minds’ in order to survive. They had to hunt when they could, outrun their natural enemies and these behaviours are so deeply ingrained in us that it’s hard to change them.

“Just think about how we eat — 40 years ago Dr Christian Barnard told the world that we needed to cut down on fat and salt, things that our ancestors needed in order to survive in their harsh landscape. But we still haven’t taken the message on board, just have a look at the global epidemic of obesity,” Abey points out. "So we need to learn how to retrain our brains to escape the limitations of our evolutionary and behavioural biology, or we will lose perspective and make the wrong choices.”

Part of the process of becoming content is about balancing the cost of getting what we want against what we want our lives to be like. Often what we think will make us happy is not the real deal and we need to understand our motivation before we act.

Abey uses the example of a man who wants to buy a Porsche.

“This man likes driving fast and he can afford to spend a lot of money on a car, so he goes out and buys one. But he lives in a suburban area and he soon discovers that he can’t drive the Porsche at maximum speed, he’s still stuck in the traffic, next to the Toyotas.”

So, how would a good financial planner have helped our speed-loving driver work out if he really wants to invest a huge amount of money in a luxury built-for-speed car? By looking at his motivations, according to Abey, and analysing why he wants the car and how he thinks it will change his life.

“It may well be that the man who thinks he wants a Porsche really wants the chance to drive like a racing driver and in Australia you can do that by going to a circuit and hiring a car and racing on a track. This is something you can’t do when you’re driving your kids to school through the morning traffic. If it’s the thrill of the race he wants then he can get that without the massive capital outlay of an expensive car and put the extra money into a good investment.”

Think about a pizza — which piece tastes best, the first or the tenth?

We live in a fast-changing world where we are bombarded with advertisements and special offers many of which claim to carry the seed of happiness in them. “But,” says Abey, “these are quick fix solutions. Think about a pizza — which piece tastes best, the first or the tenth? The first slice is about fixing an immediate want or desire, once that is satisfied our neural pathways shut down and we chew mechanically through the rest of it.”

It’s a lesson about how a glut of what we think we want won’t necessarily bring sustained bliss. We need to know where we are going and what we want to achieve with our lives in order to be able to gather the resources to fund the lifestyles we want. This is where lifestyle financial planning comes into the picture.

Abey is totally committed to the idea that financial planners have to look holistically at their clients’ needs and expectations. They have to incorporate lifestyle into the planning equation. Another caveat from the author is that you should never buy anything from a broker who earns commission on what he or she sells you. It makes sense — you’d hardly go to a surgeon who earned extra money for every extra procedure they carried out on you. You’d want them to do what was necessary to keep you healthy.

Take the example of a single mother who has a large property 15 kilometres out of town. She works fulltime and her children are at school in the city. The property is a great investment on paper because there is a chance that she will be able to sell it to a developer in the future.

However, she is stressed beyond belief by the commute into work, has trouble working out lifting schedules for her children while she is at work and if she has to take time off from work to ferry a sick child home from school her stress levels go off the chart.

Her friends all tell her that she would be mad to sell the property because property is one of the best investments she can make. She thinks that if she sold the property and bought or rented a cheaper home close to her office and her children’s school her quality of life would be greatly improved, so what would a good financial planner tell her?

First up, he would listen to her and find out as much as he could about her lifestyle and needs and get her to understand them.

Abey says that it might well be that the best thing she could do would be to sell up, invest her money taking the advice of her financial planner on how best to maximise her investment and free herself up from the stress that is draining the joy out of her life.

It’s about looking at the person and their unique situation.

“She might end up making less money than she could have if she had held on to the property, but she will have gained happiness and peace of mind.” Once again, it’s about looking at the person and their unique situation and understanding what’s best for them, not looking at ‘mathematical squiggles and projections and telling someone to follow a financial path that will make them feel trapped and unhappy’.

Peer pressure is another stumbling block on the path to finding our financial sea legs.

We live in an age of ‘Affluenza’ and have more choices than any generation has ever had before us. We have access to medical care that can extend our lives way beyond that of the even our parent’s generation and we are offered a bewildering array of things and pursuits that are deemed by the ‘herd’ to offer happiness. But, Abey cautions that we need to know what our values are and to have the courage to stick to the plan that we have made for our lives, not that it’s always easy.