About Us
Message to Our Clients
At Achieve Financial Independence Group (AFIG), we are committed to turning your dreams into reality. We are here to unlock your financial potential and help you create financial independence, using proven, safe strategies with written guarantees that bring real results. We help our clients pay off their mortgages more quickly, get out of debt faster and reach financial independence sooner. That is why our name is ‘Achieve Financial Independence Group’.
We are a group of licensed and experienced financial professionals who specialize in investments, insurance, mortgages and planning. We do not distribute our own proprietary products. We have a responsibility to you the client to find the product that is in your best interest. Large firms rely heavily on their brand to entice new clients. A small independent firm relies on its reputation to grow and expand its business. Every partner has a very direct and tangible vested interest in the success of the firm. A small independent firm needs to take greater pride in its work in order to maintain its reputation. It cannot accept even the smallest blemish, thus making its attention to detail, compliance and service a much more significant priority.
In my experience, management in large firms is most concerned with advisors maintaining a practice that will contribute to the profitability of the firm. This is not the definition of what an advisor should be doing. I was an award winning Executive Consultant with one of Canada’s major Investment Management Firms and the disconnect between how the firm felt I should conduct my business and how I knew I should conduct my business to the benefit of my clients became unsustainable. In the spring of 2009, I created AFIG Financial Services Inc. to allow me to work with my clients for their benefit.
I have been consulting a professional advisor for my financial goals for over 15 years. As a teenager, my advisor helped me purchase my first home with a tax credit under the First Time Home Buyers Program. As our relationship grew, he helped me buy and maintain a lake front cottage as well as revenue properties. He taught me the benefits of contributing to my limit in RRSP’s and TFSA’s as well as introducing me to ‘borrowing to invest’ strategies. He recommended that I apply for life insurance to protect my family and showed me how permanent life insurance can be an effective financial planning tool. Since then I have purchased land in the United States for investment purposes and also designed and built my family home on the land we purchased years ago. Without professional advice and the corresponding systems implemented to help accomplish my goals I have no idea where I would be today. I believe every advisor should ‘practice what they preach’ and be able to show their clients their own portfolios, their own rental properties, their own maxed out RRSP’s and TFSA’s, their own life insurance policies and especially, their own ‘borrowing to invest’ strategies that they are recommending. If they do not, they are just sales people selling products and not abiding by the advisor’s responsibility to act in the best interest of the client.
A definition of teaching is… to impart knowledge or skill.
A definition of selling is… to persuade or induce someone to buy something.
I believe what makes AFIG Financial Services Inc. a success is that we are teaching our clients how to achieve financial independence. Not selling. For the hundreds of clients I have helped over the years, the resounding feedback received was that it was a lot easier than they ever thought once the proper systems were implemented. At AFIG Financial Services Inc. it’s easier than you think!
- John Trudel, President of AFIG Financial Services Inc.
