Building and Maintaining Good Financial Relationships

When a big business you work for starts branching out into that business which requires financial sector regulation, you should either be worried silly or it’s a sign that the company is a really healthy one in terms of its balance sheets. Unfortunately for me the former rather than the latter applied to my situation because it turns out that the company I’d been working for branched out and ventured into the financial sector as a sign of desperation since the core business model was failing right under all our noses.

Hindsight is a beautiful thing however because although I was involved in a very technical capacity, I eventually had to learn the ins-and-outs of how the financial sector operates, having been redeployed into the financial side of the business prior to it going bankrupt. You see if you have the capital and the connections, setting up shop in the financial services industry can really set you up to rake in huge profits without really doing much “actual” work.

I mean what do brokers create? What do they contribute to society insofar as how what they contribute improves our lives?

Don’t get me wrong – it’s very easy to criticise something which you failed to successfully become a part of, so yes, perhaps there is a bit of bitterness in my criticism of the financial sector, but I learned a lot out of flying high in my technical role one day and then waking up to the news that the company I’d been working for having been redeployed into its financial wing was closing down completely due to bankruptcy.

The biggest lesson I came away with was that of just how important it is to build up and maintain good financial relationships with individuals and not with organisations which are nothing but shell structures created to separate shareholders’ power from their liability.

Think about it – is it not your personal relationship with an authoritative figure in a bank which ultimately lands you that loan for which you’d otherwise not quite qualify for had the conventional parameters of granting a loan been adhered to, to the letter? I was going to say it’s a relationship between you and your bank manager which works out to your favour in the end, but they don’t quite exist in that form these days.

So anyway, what I’m getting at is that everybody with whom you interact in your life should have you forging a good financial relationship with them, whether it’s paying them back for that fiver you were short with to supersize your lunch or if it’s something which can make a much bigger impact to both your lives, like exploring investments together through putting your capital together and in so doing ensuring you can get bigger returns on those investments.

If you don’t quite know how to proceed, simply go forth by building up relationships with people in such a manner that should something happen and you go bankrupt perhaps, they’d be more than happy to take you in, put you up and help you get back on your feet.