Safe bets pay off for ad agency boss

		Straits Times: Sun, Feb 05
	For six years until recently, Mr Stephen Mangham, 50, was the group chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Singapore, and busy managing 600 people. Today, he runs a 12-man outfit called Mangham Gaxiola, which he started with his former creative partner Robert Gaxiola. Small as it is, so far, it has been 'hugely rewarding and fun', he says, because the business is his and starting his own firm was something that he had thought about on and off over the past 15 years. His firm has got off to a flying start, having secured a founding client in CIMB bank. Mr Mangham graduated with a law degree from Oxford University, but chose to be in advertising. 'At university, I edited the uni newspaper, which made me think that I would enjoy working in an industry which is also about the art of persuasion and communication,' he says. 'I have never regretted the decision.' Mr Mangham and his wife Helen have four boys, aged 10, 15, 19 and 21. Q: Are you a spender or saver? I don't like to owe money, so I have always tried to make sure that I spend less than I earn. I try to strike a balance between making sure that we enjoy life now, and putting away enough for our old age. I don't spend much on myself. Most of my monthly income is spent (other than pension savings and mortgage payments), but I have saved all my bonus payments over the years. I spend the most on my family, on my kids' education, their swimming lessons, rugby lessons and so on. Four boys don't come cheap, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Q: How much do you charge to your credit cards every month? Probably about $5,000. I try to use debit cards rather than credit cards. Q: What financial planning have you done for yourself? A good chunk of our money is invested in property. I have a pension fund and some money in shares. And my wife has a trust in her name. But we also keep quite a lot on short-term deposit, just in case we need it, in Singapore and Britain. I'm quite conservative when it comes to investing. I don't like to take risks, and I have an aversion to managed unit trusts where agents take large commissions upfront. I invested in unit trusts which charge a 7 per cent fee and it hardly grew. It was because what little gains there were went to the fees. I have two life insurance policies, which are enough to look after my family should anything unfortunate happen. I have three properties in Europe and none here. First, I invest only in what I know well, which is my business. Second, I like to keep a lot of money in very safe schemes. I believe housing should be long-term investments. If you don't know where you are going to be in the next 10 years, investing in a market that you don't know very well is very risky. I don't believe in taking a blind gamble that prices will rise all the time. I know an expat who bought a property at the peak and was made redundant two months after that. Q: Moneywise, what were your growing-up years like? I am the oldest of three children. I have a brother and sister. My father was an aeronautical engineer and my mother a nurse. I had a comfortable, happy upbringing - a typical lower middle class one. Money was sometimes tight, but I never went without it. I grew up realising that you had to earn money before you could spend it. Q: How did you get interested in investing? My first investment was in an apartment in London when I was 22. It just seemed more sensible to buy my own place rather than pay someone else the rent. The apartment cost &pound30,000. I borrowed the 10 per cent deposit from the bank and made the purchase jointly with a friend. We then had enough money to buy a bed each, but that was about it. Q: What properties do you own? I have a two-bedroom apartment in London, which I bought in 2009 for about $1.2 million and an apartment in Cheltenham, Britain, which was purchased in 1999 for about $500,000. These two properties are tenanted out. I also bought a house in the south of France in 2006 for $850,000. We just sold a house in Cheltenham and are thinking of getting another one. Q: What's the most extravagant thing you have bought? Our greatest extravagance as a family are the family holidays. We take a few holidays a year. Our most expensive holiday was a round-the-world trip just over 10 years ago. We bought business-class tickets and took in Los Angeles, Brisbane, Sydney, Hong Kong and China over five weeks. Q: What's your retirement plan? I plan to be financially independent when I get the children off my hands! I don't plan to retire, that's for sure. I can't see a time when I'm not in this business. I enjoy it too much. Retirement will come, for sure, but it's too far away to think about it now. Q: Home is now... A leased five-bedroom bungalow with a pool near Holland Road. Q: I drive... A leased Toyota sport utility vehicle for $2,900 a month, including insurance. I would love to drive something exciting, but I can't bring myself to spend so much money on a car. [e-mail] WORST AND BEST BETS Q: What's your best investment to date? This happened when I was offered the chance to invest in the shares of a company I worked with, a public listed firm in Britain. It was going through something of a turnaround and I was one of the 50 senior guys who were given the chance to own a stake in it. I made a 300 per cent return in three years. Q: And your worst? I took out an endowment policy in the late 1980s and it fell miserably short of the target payout. I accelerated the policy from 25 years to 20 years and took the money out. The target payout was &pound90,000, but it came in at only &pound70,000. Endowment policies were very popular then; I followed the crowd. Source: The Straits Times