Home / People / Liam Shorte’s route to advice via the desert kingdom

The SMSF adviser took an unusual path to joining the profession, one that involved almost a decade playing rugby on the hot sand and gravel of Saudi Arabia.

The migration from Ireland to Australia is a well-trodden one, but not many travellers would have emulated Liam Shorte’s route.

The adviser’s unintended journey between the two countries came with an eight-year stopover in Saudi Arabia, during which time he met and married an Australian nurse.

At the time, Shorte was busy working in insurance and playing rugby at the weekends. While the latter may not spring to mind as a pastime one would associate with the desert kingdom, for Shorte it is – along with his wife – one of the main reasons for looking back fondly on his time there.

“Rugby in Saudi was fun, even though we were often playing on pitches made of sand and gravel. Grass was a luxury, and I would often think back to playing in Ireland and England and realise how much I had taken that for granted,” he recalls.

“But what was really priceless about rugby, apart from a reminder of home, was that we mixed with so many cultures: we had 22 different nationalities in our squad. I made friends from all over the world. It helped business-wise, too, but the people side of it was tremendous.”

Continuing on to Australia wasn’t part of Shorte’s plan, but life intervened in 2001.

“My wife’s father had cancer, and because we had a young child (now 22) at the time, who was the only grandchild, we decided to come down and spend six months with her parents,” he says. “But we decided to stay.”

The only complication was that the family was staying in Port Stephens, in the Hunter region of New South Wales, where jobs for Shorte’s level of experience were not exactly plentiful. “I got an opportunity with a local financial planning and accounting firm, to do some marketing,” he says. “After two weeks the para-planner left the firm, and I was asked to replace her.”

“I retrained as a paraplanner, completed the necessary exams to become an adviser, and set up my own advice business in 2006. SMSFs really grabbed my attention, and I spent the next few years reading everything available on the subject and attended many workshops and conferences on SMSFs. I joined the SMSF Association, achieved the SMSF Specialist Advisor accreditation and set a goal to become a go-to person in the SMSF area. That’s where my brand ‘The SMSF coach’ came from.”

In 2017 Shorte was included in the Barron’s Top 50 Financial Advisers in Australia list. He also now sits on the board of the SMSF Association.

Although he is a passionate proponent of SMSFs, he acknowledges the reality that the structure will not suit every client. “Only about three out of every ten people who come through our door really need an SMSF,” Shorte says. “I don’t get commissions from anywhere, all our fees are fee-for-service: we just talk to people about what’s best for them. I’ve worked with a number of industry funds, there’s several retail platforms that I use – it’s really just identifying what vehicle, or mixture, is right for that particular client.

“Often they’re very busy professionals or business owners and don’t necessarily have the time to run an SMSF properly. We really focus on what they’re trying to achieve and what’s right for them. Sometimes, clients are surprised when I talk them out of it, but I’ve found that saying ‘no’ to people usually builds trust more than just going along with what they want.”

Shorte is principal of Verante Financial Planning, based in the Hills and Hawkesbury districts of Sydney, and is renowned in the industry as a voice on SMSF and retirement issues, most notably through the popular, plain-English ‘The SMSF Coach’ blog. On top of his SMSF Specialist Advisor designation he has a degree in Business Studies from the University of Limerick and an Advanced Diploma in Financial Services.

In what is perhaps a throwback to his rugby days, Liam Shorte prefers the term ‘coach’, rather than ‘planner’ or ‘adviser’, to describe the role he plays. He believes it best fits the way the works, and the way the profession should think about itself.

“I think ‘coach’ gets to the heart of it, because it’s not about us laying out our knowledge to the client and saying, ‘I’m telling you what you should do.’ Ideally, it should be interactive and educational,” he says.

“If a client truly understands where they’re putting their money and why, or who understands why they’re salary-sacrificing or super-splitting, you get engagement,” the adviser continues. “And when people buy in to something and understand it, they’re less likely to panic when something goes wrong in the short term.”

The self-confessed “rugby tragic” enjoys living in Australia and everything that it has to offer, but there is one thing that he would change about the local investor mindset – our “blind faith” in property.

“Of all the behavioural finance biases I see, the one that’s most prevalent, without doubt, is that ‘you can’t lose on property’. And when that is framed as the reason to establish an SMSF, to hold that single asset, that’s where people can actually go quite wrong indeed,” he says.