Some people may find it cliché, but one of the noblest deeds to do in this world is to help others. In today’s erratic world, everyone wants to be financially independent. People have many ideas in their minds, but they don’t have the financial planning to support them. They start with a lot of passion, but due to a lack of proper advice, they are not able to achieve their dreams. With the spirit to help others financially and let them fuel their dreams with appropriate financial guidance, Catherine Smith founded her brainchild, Wholistic Financial Solutions.
Behind the curtain scenes
At the age of 21, Catherine was aiming to help others with her financial experience. However, at that stage, she was a little short on that. Before fulfilling her vision to help others financially, Catherine worked as a Tax Fraud Investigator with the Australian Taxation Office.
Catherine explains “While I loved my job and I felt I was serving an important role in the system I did not really feel like I was helping people. I wanted to be in a role where I could assist people with their financial lives rather than just punish those who had done the wrong thing.” So, she left the Australian Taxation Office and focused herself on working towards fulfilling her vision.
She continued to broaden her education from a Degree in Accounting and a Master’s Degree in Taxation and completed an Advanced Diploma of Financial Planning & Insurance, a Diploma of Finance (Mortgage Broking), a Diploma of Real Estate and studied to be an Accredited Property Investment Adviser. She also qualified as a Justice of Peace in the ACT.
While expanding her knowledge base, Catherine also gained the necessary experience and honed her financial skills. She states, “My 20 years of study was primarily as a result of my frustration with the whole Financial Advisory Sector. There was no professional field looking after the whole of a client’s financial needs. Frustrated with the whole industry, I went on a sidetrack and qualified to be a Life Coach, NLP practitioner, Hypnotherapist, Results coach, and Advanced Presenter and Trainer. Once I realized that I had qualified in every financial profession and was now a Life Coach, I remembered my vision of providing ‘wholistic financial solutions’ to help clients grow and protect wealth.“
Catherine began advising clients by assessing their goals, needs, wants, and the financial feasibility of the goals both now and in the future. Then based on these goals and the client’s own interests, she devised individual wealth creation strategies to assist them in creating, building, and protecting wealth. She then, branded these solutions and set up the business and called it Wholistic Financial Solutions.
Crossing every hurdle along the way
Catherine has come a long way to achieve everything she has today. She had to go through a lot of troughs where he was challenged mentally, emotionally, physically, and financially.
She started the business in 2002 when her four kids were under the age of seven. In 2006, Catherine became a victim of domestic violence and a very stressful marriage breakdown. She had to close the business and move interstate to protect herself and her kids.
In 2006, she collected herself and started her business again. Having the passion for assisting her clients in property investments and arranging mortgages, Catherine invested in the new venture by investing in a franchise called Investor Finance. But fate had a different plan for her. After a month, when she invested $350,000 in franchise fees and office setup, the franchisor announced their liquidation due to the Global Financial Crises (GFC).
Having lost significant amounts of investment in this venture, Catherine relied on her last resort. She continued the business by investing $240,000 into a related business that owned a real estate rent roll. However, she still landed in a bear trap.
The director of that company fraudulently stole all the funds. Catherine appointed a liquidator to try and recover the stolen funds, but while the liquidator recovered these funds, they used them all in their own fees. This ultimately ended up seeing Catherine lose everything she had worked so hard to build and going bankrupt.
“The stress was too much to bear, and my new husband tried to commit suicide. Then our marriage fell apart and the children were affected again. I did not think I could go on any longer. I felt like a complete failure. I even attempted suicide myself, but luckily, I failed at that too” Catherine explains. She was devastated on all fronts.
It was then her mindset training appeared as the last ray of hope in her life. She collected herself and worked hard to reach new heights professionally and personally. Catherine states “No matter what the situation, my kids never left my side and supported me at every turn in our lives.”
“They have been through hard times. They have seen me go through four marriage breakdowns. They have seen me work myself to the bone. They have seen me go through terrible times where I was bankrupted, and I could not afford to buy them new shoes or pay for school excursions. They have then seen me pick myself back up, time and time again, and re-build a very successful business and family home. They have always been supportive, and they help out as much as kids can,” she adds.
She explains “A breakthrough came when I realised that all my mistakes – and I have made my fair share – actually made me who I am, made me stronger and in an even better position to assist clients through all their troubles in life, both personally and financially.”
Redefining financial industry with Wholistic Financial Solutions
Catherine states that the current financial advice system in Australia is fundamentally flawed. It prohibits the average Australian from obtaining quality, professional financial advice tailored to their individual circumstances. Accountants and tax advisors, financial planners, finance (mortgage) advisors, and property advisors are currently all separate professions, governed by separate laws, monitored by separate governing bodies, and operate as silos.
People will often receive differing opinions on the same topic from different professional advisors, as the opinions are often driven by the advisors’ source of revenue. Clients don’t get a structured strategy covering all aspects and options, as professional advisors are strongly influenced by their own financial interests, rather than creating value for their customers.
To break the shackles of this approach and overcome the flaws, Catherine built the Wholistic Financial Solutions model.
Wholistic Financial Solutions (WFS) is a unique multidisciplinary financial services firm, founded on the fundamental principle that all Australians should have access to quality, affordable financial advice that addresses all of their financial needs and goals.
Currently, there are no other financial firms in Australia licensed, insured, registered, and qualified to provide advice in all the financial fields that Wholistic Financial Solutions offers.
WFS clients are everyday Australians wanting to create and protect wealth for themselves and their families. The WFS team works with the aim to provide financial freedom to all their clients. They believe in partnering with clients to advise, educate and guide them to make the right financial choices.
Catherine states, “Our motto is ‘It’s all about YOU.’ The client is the fundamental focus of our firm, and our aim is to always put the client’s needs and goals first. All advice given is only given if it is truly in the best interests of the client, people before profit. We base our advice on assessing the client’s goals, needs, and wants and the financial feasibility of the goals both now and in the future. Based on these goals and the client’s own preferences, we devise individual wealth creation strategies to assist clients in creating, building, and protecting wealth.”
Wearing the hats of CEO and Managing Director
In the past, Catherine had to do everything as the company was in the building stage and things were not going in her way. She built it with her blood and soul, taking all the challenges with an ever strengthening heart and mind.
Currently, as the company has grown, she has excellent directors running each division. Everyone is an expert in their respective domains and takes the onus to offer the best services to the clients.
Catherine provides ample space for them to grow individually so that they can contribute towards the betterment of the company. She adds, “I have been able to elevate myself to the position I have always dreamed about. I no longer get involved in the daily grind of the detailed work. We have designed systems and procedures so that staff can easily handle most tasks without the need for my micro-management or interference.”
As the CEO and Managing Director, Catherine oversees the high-priority tasks and tries to give a constant dose of motivation to her teams. She states, “My main role is now overseeing the firm from a high level, focusing on future planning and innovation. My favorite part is seeing clients face to face and developing their overarching financial direction in all aspects of their financial life. I am then able to delegate the detailed work of implementing this plan to the team who are all specialized in their own fields.”
She has worked hard to reach this level of success, and this is demonstrated clearly by the awards she and her company have received.
Catherine states, “Over the last few years, we have been recognized as finalists in over 50 awards. The most notable were being a finalist in the 2017 and 2018 Telstra Business Awards in the ACT, and in 2019, I won the Telstra Businesswomen’s Award for the ACT. I have also been recognized as a finalist in seven categories of the IFA Excellence Awards, six categories in the Women in Finance Awards, and we won three categories in the 2018 SMSF and Accounting Awards. The awards are a great recognition of the uniqueness of our model and our leadership in the financial industry.”
Achieving balance in professional and personal life
Being a single mum of four supporting her family on her own, balancing everything in the past during the company’s staging phase was a little complicated to say the least.
Even today, Catherine lives a hectic personal life. She is a firm believer in taking time off from work to refresh her mind and body. She made the Australian Dragon Boating Team in 2012 and was part of a crew that broke the Guinness Book of Records for longest distance in a Dragon Boat in 24 hours.
She states “I am very physically active and when my goal was to make the Australian dragon boating team, I trained at least seven times a week.”
Even with her business and physical training demands, Catherine makes time for her family and kids. While her four children are now older and do not take up as much of her time as they used to, she still loves to indulge with them. “We still have family meals most nights and, no matter how busy our schedules are, we holiday together in summer, boating and wakeboarding, and in winter on the ski slopes.” says Catherine happily.
Future prospects for Wholistic Financial Solutions and the birth of Freedom Financial Solutions
The 2020-21 draconian plandemic response had a significant effect on the mental, physical, emotional, and financial health of many Australians. When the government, in their blind wisdom, forced all but a handful of ‘essential’ businesses to close across Australia, Catherine foresaw the looming economic and financial crisis.
Put simply, when everyone is locked up at home, who keeps the supply chain running? Who tills the soil, grows the food, harvests the crops, drives this to the production factories or docks, loads and transports it to people who need it? No-one. The same applies to every industry, from construction to medical supplies.
When everyone is locked up and prevented from making their normal productive contributions, the world economic machine faces the real danger of irrevocable seizure. When this happens, the likely result is permanent job losses and business closures, and shelter and food shortages to say the least.
Seeing this as a real and imminent possibility, Catherine shifted her focus from helping people grow their wealth, to helping people protect their existing wealth, and in some cases to simply survive.
Then in 2021, when tens of thousands of Australians also started to lose their jobs because of the now acknowledged, unnecessary, unlawful, and harmful medical mandates, Catherine experienced an unprecedented surge in the numbers of clients desperate for financial help to survive.
Shockingly, clients including previously sought after, highly trained professionals, who had not once considered they would be cast aside, left to stare down a future of impoverishment. Catherine began helping these paramedics, teachers, police officers, age carers, emergency service support workers, and other all with decades of experience who were terminated for not agreeing to subject themselves to the world’s largest medical experiment. Australians who held firm to their basic human right: my body, my choice.
To support this sudden surge in client demand, and to protect Wholistic Financial Solutions from any fallout owing to financial opinions that the mainstream considered unorthodox, Catherine created a new arm in her business called Freedom Financial Solutions FFS Pty Ltd.
Catherine’s experience and observation tells her that the world’s financial system is on the verge of collapse, and with that very real prospect on the horizon, the safest thing people can do to prepare to protect their future is to sell investment properties, pay down debt, and convert all investments, including superannuation to physical gold and silver.
More and more everyday Australians are now seeing what Catherine sees and, since 2022, Freedom Financial Solutions FFS Pty Ltd client-base has skyrocketed 2000 per cent, with no signs of slowing down.
It turns out that there is an ever-increasing number of Australians willing to do whatever it takes to reinvent themselves financially to protect their basic human rights. ‘My body, my choice’ is not for sale it seems.
Many of Catherine’s new Freedom FFS clients are taking direct action to create real financial freedom and remove themselves from what they can now see is a slave-workforce system run by an unlawful government.
These ‘my body my choice’ heroes, who the government-led mainstream has discarded and in many cases left to starve, are now redefining what it means to be Australian, and using their energy – both physical and financial – to create a new independent, self-sustaining, self-fulfilling Australian based on traditional human and community values.
Catherine stands ready to help.
