‘LIFE IS FOR LIVING, NOT JUST INVESTING’
Richard Forster, ex-RN, ex-arms-seller, and former business adviser to a Sultan’s family, has taken a different path from his 200 fellow financial advisers guiding the lives of the retired in Queensland.
‘Life,’ the greying Forster tells his client as he settles down, ‘is for living, not just for investing.’ And that can raise the eyebrows of a gentleman who has worked his way to the top of the company tree and is thinking of placing his savings and superannuation in the hands of a consultant.
Forster is a partner in the franchise of the national company Retireinvest, which has been named best financial adviser in Australia (by a leading industry magazine) for four of the last five years. ‘A lot of financial advisers have not grasped the fact that what people are asking for is to have a load taken off their minds. We find a great number of retirees have unnecessary financial worries. They don’t know how to get the best out of their money. They have the biggest sum of money they gave ever seen, apart from when they bought their house, and they feel it will last forever. But after a year or so, unless they behave very sensibly, they find they are starting to dig into it. And that brings depression, misery and sometimes ill-health.’
So Richard Forster works out for them what is needed; adds in the estimated spending on a holiday, painting the house, changing the car every now and again. And shows that in a wise, investment-efficient way, a sizeable income can be achieved with many people paying no tax at all. (There are, he says, investments that are "smiled upon" by governments who wish to make it easier for them to look after the country’s ageing).
Forster’s own path to a flourishing future came about because he had eye trouble. ‘I was in the Fleet Air Arm and found my eyesight was not good enough to allow me to fly any more. So I chose to come out of the Navy.’
He started a small finance company in Britain that specialised in leasing; then he ran a couple of restaurants, a day-to-day life that was blissfully uneventful compared with his next move: to Beirut, as an arms salesman. ‘It got altogether too exciting. I was representing arms manufacturers and one side loved me; the other didn’t. I thought, in the end, it was better that I left.’
He travelled down the Gulf to the Sultanate of Oman. When he arrived in the early 70s, the people were "still living in the middle ages", the country being prevented by the fundamentalist Sultan from exploiting its oil, industrialising or modernising its facilities. ‘Soon after I got there the new Sultan took over from his father in a virtually bloodless coup. It was a situation strongly supported by the UK.’
The timing of the uprising was not totally unexpected, Whitehall being sufficiently aware of an impending change in rule to have the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force offshore and "happened to have" an executive aircraft ready which flew the wounded Sultan off to London and a suite at the Dorchester where he was treated and finally died. Richard Forster remained as a commercial adviser in the sultanate for 12 years - being there when the Sultan put down the troubles with South Yemen and began to haul his country and its economy into the 20th century. ‘There were 900 schoolchildren when I got there. When I departed in 1986 there were 230,000 at school and 9,000 schoolteachers. Ports and airports were developed, factories were established and the economy boomed.
‘Oman is a terrific country with lively, outward-looking people, as opposed to some of their neighbours who are xenophobic and insular. They have always been traders and seafarers; an extraordinary polite people who enjoy dealing with foreigners.’
Richard Forster was for years an international squash player and a keen golfer; so keen that he helped set up a golf course in "a horrid, arid, rocky valley" where golfers hit off a portable square of Astro-turf then picked the square up again and placed it under their ball once more; greens were oiled sand. The conditions helped get his handicap down to its present 12.
When it was time to depart, the ex-Navy man tried to take over the authorship of a series of yachtsmens’ pilot books produced for the Mediterranean. ‘But my wife mutinied and wanted to go and see Australia. We took our holidays in each of the capital cities to get a feel of what it was like. Australia, to me, was like falling in love all over again...’
He joined a firm of long-established retirement and investment advisers in Brisbane and said he would like to live and consult on the Gold Coast. They said it was a bad idea; the Coast already had 200-odd investment advisers talking accountancy, taxation and stocks and bonds, and hardly room for another.
The bluff, cheery Forster said he would try, and advertised that he would be holding a seminar. Sixty people turned up. His franchise today is amongst the most profitable of all 86 scattered around the nation.
