Most people spend more time planning their next overseas holiday than they spend planning the next thirty years of their finances. And I get it - planning a holiday is fun. You research the hotels, you compare the flights, you optimise every day. All that effort pays off. You get a better trip.

Cameron Drury  ·  Co-Founder, Canwi

The same logic applies to your finances. Put the time in. Do the research. Build the plan. And the return on that effort isn't a slightly better holiday - it's potentially millions of dollars of difference in your life.

I know that because I lived the other version of that story.

Early in my career, I was working on Advice Transformation projects - it was in the wake of FOFA and the general exodus of banks from the Advice space after they'd been . One of the projects I worked on was focused on trying to engage Aussies with their finances. And the advice I received for my own money at the time was well-meaning: "You work hard. Spend it now. There'll be plenty of time to save later."

I was earning $55,000. I worked super long hours and I fully expected my income to grow significantly over the next few years. The advice made sense. So I did.

A colleague of mine got different advice - from his parents. Buy a place at Manly Vale. Live on two-minute noodles. Pay it off fast.

Almost 10 years later, we caught up. He'd paid off his apartment. It was now worth $900,000. I had $80,000 in savings and was starting to think of buying an apartment.

That was my wake-up call. It wasn't a gradual realisation - but a single, jarring moment that made it impossible to not wonder why I hadn't made better decisions. I hadn't been reckless. I hadn't made catastrophic decisions. In fact for my age I wasn't even in a bad position. I just hadn't had a plan. And the cost of not having one was clearly enormous.

Here's what made it worse: I already worked in financial services. I understood the system better than most people.

Over 11 million Australians say they need financial advice but can't get it. The average cost of seeing a financial planner is around $5,000 - before you've made a single decision. You pay upfront, answer a lot of questions, wait a few weeks, and receive a 70-page document full of legal jargon that tells you what to do. Then your life changes - a new job, a baby, a property - and the plan is already out of date.

I should know, I paid $6,600 for advice in the early days of building Canwi and between the discovery sessions and the presentation of the final Statement of Advice I'd quit my job to go all in on building Canwi... To be clear - my advisor was good, the advice was helpful. But in the month or so between the discovery sessions and the day the Statement of Advice was in my inbox a meaningful chunk of the document no longer reflected my situation. That's not the fault of anyone involved, that's just how the process works. It's slow, it's static and life doesn't wait for it. Even the government acknowledged that the industry needs fundamental reform and is failing.

Most people, faced with the current situation, do nothing to plan for their future. Priced out of advice and with no obvious alternative; inertia wins - and every year they put it off, the gap between where they are and where they could be gets a little wider.

Some people (and if you're readying this, you're probably one of them) take matters into their own hands. They open a spreadseheet and start modelling. They spend a weekend, maybe a few on it. The problem is that building a comprehensive plan that actually holds up is harder than it looks. Did you account for inflation? Wage growth? The difference between money in an offset vs redirecting to super? The knock-on costs of buying a property that most people only discover at settlement? These may seem small - but they're often the assumptions that change answers, and after weeks of work you can end up with a model you're still not sure you can trust.

Some turn to AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude to fill the gaps - but handing your big financial decisions to something you can't audit certainly doesn't fill me with confidence.

That's where we come in. You shouldn't have to spend weeks building a model from scratch only to wonder at the end whether you can trust it. And good financial decision-making shouldn't shit behind a $5,000 fee. Canwi does the modelling - properly with clear, editable assumptions built in - so you can spend your energy on the decisions not the spreadsheet.

The research is pretty clear about what this costs: people who have a financial plan end up with roughly four times more wealth after fifteen years than those who don't. For the average Australian millennial, that's the difference between where you are now and being a million dollars better off. Multiply that across 11 million people who can't access advice, and it's $11 trillion left on the table.

The central bet we're making is simple: if building a financial plan is easy enough, the benefits clear enough and the experience fun enough, most people will actually do it. And if they do it, they'll end up meaningfully better off - not because we told them what to do, but because they figured it out themselves with the right tools.

I want to be clear about something though. Canwi isn't about hiding complexity or pretending finances are simple. It isn't always. Concepts like concessional contributions, Div293 Tax, or the carry-forward rule matter - and abstracting them away doesn't help anyone. We believe that the detail should be explained clearly, in plain language, piece by piece so that you can actually understand the decisions you're making rather than just following instructions. That's what the Canwis blog is for. It's what the platform is built around. Engaged and informed beats overwhelmed and stuck every time.

Think of it like planning that holiday - but for your financial life. The same energy you'd put into finding the best flights, comparing the hotels, working out the itinerary. Except instead of two weeks somewhere good, the payoff is the next thirty years somewhere great.

- Cameron

This article reflects the personal views and experiences of the author. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial product advice.