Please read this first
The Cashflow Drilldown is a separate service and is not credit assistance. It is engaged under its own written agreement, for its own fee, and nothing about it forms part of arranging a loan.
The $1,980 fee is a fee for this service. It is not a cost of obtaining credit, and it is not a Credit Quote. A Credit Quote is a separate document that would set out any fee payable to me for credit assistance. If I ever propose to charge you a fee for credit assistance, you will receive a Credit Quote before any work starts — and if you do not receive one, no fee for credit assistance is payable.
Engaging the Drilldown creates no obligation to apply for a loan through me, and applying for a loan does not require you to engage the Drilldown. You can use one, the other, or neither.
If you do go on to arrange a loan through me, I would be paid commission by the lender on that loan in addition to the Drilldown fee you have already paid. Those are two separate payments arising from one relationship, and you should know that before you start rather than after.
Why this exists
I established this service after multiple clients identified a lack of savings as a barrier to entering the property market. Almost nobody knew the full extent of what happens to their money the moment it hits their account, or understood how historical decisions were affecting their current cashflow.
Almost nobody knows what that number actually is for them. Not because they're careless. Because nobody has ever put the whole thing on one page and made them look at it.
That's what this is. Not a budget template. Not a lecture about coffee. Your real transactions, categorised properly, laid out so you can see where the money is actually going and decide for yourself what you want to do about it.
Everyone knows where their money goes
Ask anyone and they will tell you roughly what they spend. A rough figure on groceries, a rough figure on the car, a bit here and there. Most people are quietly confident about it.
Then I put twelve months of their own transactions in front of them, sorted and totalled, and the same thing happens that happens nearly every time. They go quiet. Then they ask me to go back a page.
It isn't that people are careless with money. It's that nobody has ever shown them a whole year of it at once. A nine dollar subscription doesn't feel like anything. Neither does the fourteen dollar one. A dozen of them running for twelve months is a holiday.
“We can't afford it”
If you have caught yourself saying any of these, this is the conversation worth having:
- We can't afford a holiday this year.
- How do people we know manage to afford that?
- I earn decent money and I have no idea where it goes.
- We'll start putting something away properly once things settle down.
None of those are really about income. I have sat with people on very good money who felt broke, and people on a good deal less who were quietly getting ahead. The difference almost never came down to what they earned. It came down to what happened in the days after it landed in the account.
Auto-pilot is the actual problem
Most spending isn't a decision. It's a direct debit set up three years ago, a subscription that quietly renewed, a premium that crept up at renewal without a phone call, an arrangement that made sense when you set it and that nobody has looked at since.
I have yet to go through twelve months of someone's statements and not find something they were paying for without knowing it. Not occasionally. So far, every single time.
That is not a failing on anyone's part. It is simply what happens when money moves automatically and no one audits it.
This is not about giving up your lifestyle
I am not going to tell you to stop buying coffee, or to cancel the streaming service your kids actually use. That advice is dull and faintly insulting, and it isn't why you'd be here.
The point is to make the spending conscious. Once you can see the whole picture, you decide what stays and what goes — and most people find the changes they want to make are obvious and close to painless once the numbers are in front of them. The things you would genuinely miss stay exactly where they are.
What changes is that your money starts going where you chose, instead of where it has always gone.
What putting something aside actually means
No lecture about compounding. Just this: a conscious decision to set a little aside today so there is a better position tomorrow. Deciding, once, that some portion of what comes in is yours to keep rather than yours to spend.
Most people can't make that decision because they don't know what's genuinely spare. Once you do know, the figure is usually larger than expected — and redirecting even part of it changes the shape of your loan and the number of years in front of you. The repayment calculator will show you what an extra monthly amount does to a loan; the Drilldown is how you find out what that amount could realistically be.
That is what the twelve months is for.
Download the information sheet (PDF)
How it works
You send twelve months of statements
Every account and every card, a full year of them. Twelve months rather than three, because the things that quietly wreck a budget are annual — council rates, strata, car registration, insurance premiums, school fees. Look at a single quarter and you either miss them entirely or you catch one and assume it happens every month. Sent through a secure upload link, not email and not the enquiry form on this site. I never ask for your online banking login, and you should never give it to anyone who does. Here is how to download them from each of the major banks — CSV if your bank offers it, PDF if it doesn't.
I go through them line by line
Every transaction, categorised. Not sampled, not estimated, not rounded to the nearest hundred. This is the part that takes the time and it's the part that makes the rest of it worth anything.
We sit down and go through it together
An hour or so, in person or by video. You see your own numbers, category by category, against what an average household your size spends. Some of it will be about what you expected. Some of it won't.
You get it in writing
A written breakdown you keep — where the money went, what's fixed and what's genuinely discretionary, what your surplus really is, and what redirecting part of it would do to your loan over time. Yours to act on however you want.
We check in a few months later
A second look at a fresh set of statements to see what actually changed. Intentions are easy in the room and harder in March. This is the part that makes the difference stick.
What it costs
$1,980
That's $1,800 plus $180 GST. It covers the whole thing: the statement work, the session, the written breakdown you keep, and the follow-up review a few months later. There is nothing else to pay.
Payable after our first conversation and before I start work on your statements, so you know exactly what you're committing to before you commit to it.
You get a proper tax invoice with the GST shown separately. Whether the fee is deductible in your particular situation is a question for your accountant — that turns on your circumstances, and I'm not registered to give tax advice.
The fee is for this service only. It is separate from any credit assistance, and there is no obligation to take a loan through me at the end of it.
If it wasn't worth it, you get your money back
Every cent of it. If you finish the session and don't feel you've learned something real about where your money goes, where your current habits are taking you, and what you could adjust to improve your position — say so and I'll refund the full $1,980.
You decide that, not me. You don't have to build a case or talk me round. Ask within 7 days of the session and the money goes back the same way it came.
You keep the written breakdown either way. If the work wasn't worth paying for, taking it back off you doesn't make it worth any more.
None of this affects the rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law, which apply regardless of anything written here.
What that conflict does not change
The two payments are set out at the top of this page, and your knowing about them is the point of putting them there. What they do not do is change what the numbers say. If your position is better served by staying exactly where you are, that is what the report will show and that is what I will tell you. Where any conflict between your interests and mine exists or could reasonably be perceived, I am obliged to disclose it and to put your interests first — and any commission arrangements are set out in the Credit Guide you receive before any credit assistance is given.
What this is and isn't
It is an information service. I gather your transaction history, organise it, and show you what it says.
It is not credit assistance. It is not financial product advice, and nothing in it addresses superannuation, insurance or investments — see where I stop. It is not a debt negotiation service; I do not contact your lenders or creditors on your behalf or seek to vary your contracts.
It is not a substitute for help if you are in trouble. If you are behind on repayments, being contacted by creditors, or genuinely struggling to keep up, this is not the right service for you and I will say so rather than take your money. The National Debt Helpline on 1800 007 007 provides help at no cost and that is where you should start.
How your statements are handled
Statements are received through a secure upload link and stored in access-controlled storage. Bank statements can incidentally reveal sensitive information — a medical provider, a place of worship, a membership — and by sending them you consent to that information being collected as part of the transaction history. For the Drilldown, it is used only to categorise your spending.
You can ask me to delete the underlying statements once the report is complete, and I will. The full detail is in the Privacy Policy.
If you later apply for a loan
This is worth being plain about, because it is the one place where the two services touch.
When you apply for a loan, the law requires me to make reasonable inquiries about your financial situation and to take reasonable steps to verify it. Bank statements are the ordinary way that verification is done. So if you have already given me twelve months of statements for the Drilldown, it would be sensible to use those same documents rather than ask you for them twice.
That does not happen automatically. Your Drilldown statements are not used for any loan purpose unless you ask me to use them and agree to it in writing at the time you apply. If you would rather supply a fresh set for the loan, or have the Drilldown statements deleted first, say so and that is what will happen.
Two things follow, and neither changes because the documents are shared:
- The Drilldown fee remains a fee for the Drilldown. It is not a cost of your loan, it is not a Credit Quote, and it is not refunded, discounted or offset against anything by arranging finance through me.
- The loan assessment is still a loan assessment. Verifying your position for a credit application is work I do under my credit representative obligations, and the Drilldown report itself is not a substitute for it.
Getting started
Have a conversation with me first. It costs nothing, it takes twenty minutes, and at the end of it you will have a clear idea of whether this is worth doing for your household or whether it isn't.