Dante Fife

Representing the levels and forms of aroha that can be found throughout our lives across our many communities. We acknowledge the wide range of obstacles and the journey it takes to overcoming everything that stands in our way to expressing aroha within.

Ko wai koe? What are your strengths/weakness?

I’m Dante Fife. I’ve been a financial advisor for the last seven years. I worked at a financial advice business for two years before going out on my own five years ago. Financial advice is quite broad. People don’t realize there are four main areas within financial advice: 

1. Fire and General Insurance: This includes house, car, contents insurance, and business insurance for equipment and similar items. 

1. Personal Risk Insurance: This covers life insurance, private medical insurance, income protection, mortgage protection, trauma cover, and TPD (Total and Permanent Disability) cover. 

1. Mortgages and Lending. 

1. Investments and KiwiSaver. 

I specialize in three of these four areas. Most advisors specialize in just one or two, but I chose to do three because of the particular demographic I work with: low to middle-income people, mostly Māori and Pacific. They prefer to work with one advisor rather than multiple, which is why many Pacific people have most of their financial services with their banks. They trust them because it’s just easier. 

Weaknesses 

I’ll start with a weakness: I just can’t say no. That’s probably my biggest weakness. I say yes to everything, which means I can get overwhelmed with too much stuff. They say, “Give a busy person something to do, and they’ll get it done.” I will get it done, which is probably why people come to me asking for help. But sometimes, I feel a bit overwhelmed. I wear a few different hats and can’t say no to different boards and things. It’s hard. If I haven’t tracked things right, I can get behind on something. It’s usually about prioritizing different tasks and projects and making sure I’m on top of everything. 

Strengths 

On the other hand, my strength is that I care a lot about what people expect of me and about people in general. That’s why I do quite a bit in the community space, especially with the Pacific community in Ōtautahi. I want to help as much as I can and get things done. I think having a heart for the community and my space in financial advice is a strength of mine. 

A lot of the industry doesn’t have the time or the heart for getting involved in the community space. The industry is commission-based, so when you’re on commission and need to make ends meet, you focus on your business rather than giving voluntary or lower-paid time to the community. That’s a decision I made when I entered this industry: to have that balance. 

I’m half New Zealand Samoan and half New Zealand Pālagi. My dad’s Pālagi, and my mum’s Samoan. I’ve lived in two worlds my whole life. I describe myself as a true coconut: brown on the outside but Pālagi on the inside. I see that our Pacific people give so much, often to our detriment. We end up gifting at funerals or weddings far beyond what we can afford, leading to short-term, high-interest loans. Being in the financial advice industry, I see this daily. It’s the beauty of our people but also a challenge. We’re so generous, but sometimes too much. 

Seeking guidance from our kaitiaki Hiwa-i-te-rangi, we take a journey through our different aspirations, goals and dreams. This tohu acknowledges hard work, wisdom, the reach of ones goals and the desire that comes from this mahi.

What were/are your career aspirations leading into your chosen career path?​

I grew up very Pālagi. My parents were in the army, so we moved around a lot as kids. We pretty much lived at every army base in New Zealand. This meant we moved around a lot, and when we finally settled, we were actually out of Burnham. Then we moved into Christchurch main after a couple of years for me to go to high school. 

Going to high school down here, it was a very Pālagi high school. Even before that, when we lived in Ākarana, Tāmaki Makaurau, the only experiences of my Samoan side were going to Nana and Papa’s church in Māngere. Weddings and funerals, things like that, you get to experience a lot of the fa’asamoa, but I grew up very Pālagi and went to a very Pālagi high school. 

It wasn’t until university that I joined the Samoan Students’ Association. They have a big gathering between all the associations from all the universities once a year, with performances on stage and a sports day. There’s a church service and things like that, but it’s everyone coming together to share around being Samoan. 

For me, that was a huge learning experience. That was where I saw a lot more. I was practicing it. I had to do the practices for our performance and things like that. It was all very awkward, but meeting certain people there became the catalyst for my involvement in the Pacific community space and wanting to help our people in any way that I could. 

Post-university, I did a BCom in management, but it didn’t guide me anywhere. I got an internship at an IT company for a couple of weeks and realized that I didn’t want to be a project manager in the IT space. So, I ended up doing project management. No, sorry… 

After uni, I did a BCom in management, realized that it was too general, and I needed to become more specific. So, I went to Polytech. It was the Christchurch Polytechnic before it became ARA, and I did a Graduate Diploma in Project Management. It was going into a specialization of project management, not just general management. I mean, it just meant nothing really. It was just a piece of paper, and I spent too long at uni, so I needed to just finish with something. 

I did project management around the time of the earthquakes, so I got into project management in the construction industry. I only did that short internship at that IT company. I kind of just pulled out of it because I decided, no, this wasn’t the pathway for me. I wanted to join construction. 

I joined the construction industry as a Project Manager, started as an Assistant Project Manager, then a Junior, and then just before I left, they made me fully fledged. 

I left the industry because the project I was working on was a very controversial one for Christchurch. We were a project management company with one hundred to two hundred people working for this company, and our sole project was the main insurer for Christchurch… house insurer, so it was government. It was very controversial. There were lots of conflicts and butting heads with local residents. 

There was one decision that was made, and I thought, actually no, I don’t want to be a part of the project anymore. I had a couple of friends in the financial advice industry, and they encouraged me to join. I had a think about it… it was commission-based, so it was also structured in a way that we were self-employed contractors to this financial advice firm, and they would take a cut. It was very interesting, and I thought, this will be a great challenge, so I joined the industry and became a self-employed contractor. It was a 60/40 split on the commission. I had a good first year. 

My industry at that time, this was seven years ago (2017), felt like the Wild West. It was high commissions, and it still is high commission, but there are way more rules now. The qualification is now in place, which is only a certificate, but there’s something there. When I first entered the industry, I just signed a one-page form, sent it to the government, and I was a financial advisor. 

There are a lot of advisers who have been around the industry for so long, I’m sure they were used to their lifestyle. To be fair, they can still live that lifestyle today, but there’s just a lot more paperwork, a lot more accountability, and a lot more transparency with our clients, which has been great. 

When I first entered the industry, I was like… how was this allowed? Coming from construction, where the health and safety requirements were just ramping up, there was a lot of accountability and protection going on. 

Entering the industry and becoming self-employed… that’s how it was sold to me. You’re going to be self-employed, so you manage your own time. At that stage of my life, I wanted to start some Pacific projects. I wouldn’t be able to do those projects or get them off the ground to the same level or within a good time frame if I was working 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday. If I had more flexibility in my time management, then I could get these projects off the ground in the Pacific community. That was the biggest driver to entering the industry. 

In the industry, you get told, “You can earn so much money.” Some of these guys are earning one hundred, two hundred thousand dollars a year. They work their butts off for it, don’t get me wrong, but you can earn really good money in the industry. I don’t really care, to be honest. I just wanted to be self-employed. That was kind of what led me into the industry… it was the aspiration of being able to do Pacific projects. So that’s seven years ago. 

With adventure comes challenges as well as obstacles to overcome. We stand proud as we overcome these obstacles. This tohu draws inspiration from the Niho Taniwha and Aramoana patterns. We acknowledge reaching our destination and preparing ourselves for the many new adventures ahead.

How wīwī wāwā has your career adventure been?​

When I got out of university, it was just about figuring out who would give me a job. I actually started working in a furniture factory. That whole year out of university, I was applying for jobs. I managed to get an internship, but it was unpaid. I was very lucky that my friend’s family owned the furniture company, and they gave me a couple of days off each week to do this internship at a project management company for the former Mayor of Christchurch, Gary Moore. He gave me a couple of days a week for about six months. 

I was working in a factory and applying for jobs with a BCom in Management but couldn’t get a single job. I applied for all sorts of roles, even admin and reception, just to get into an office because I was standing there working from seven till four in a furniture factory. I thought, man, I can’t discredit the work the boys do in that factory, but I didn’t study for three years to be working here. It was just disheartening that year. It was positive, getting an internship. 

There was a good stepping stone; it gave me a bit of a taste of what it could be like to be a project manager or to get a taste of the industry. But at the end of that year and the beginning of the next year, I applied to do a Graduate Diploma in Project Management because I thought I’d upskill in this field and hopefully get a job as a Project Manager. I enrolled at CPIT (now ARA) at the Polytech, and then three months later, probably in late March, Gary at the internship offered me a full-time job. I told him I had just enrolled full-time for a one-year graduate diploma and asked if it would be okay if I came in one hour earlier and stayed one hour later each day to attend lectures at the Polytech. He said that was fine. 

For that year, I was studying full-time and working full-time. It was probably the hardest year in terms of time management I’ve ever had in my life, but it was well worth it. I got into the industry, spent a few years as a project manager, and then obviously changed careers. 

The other part of this adventure began five years ago when I went out on my own. Around the same time, an old friend from uni and I started the Pacific Business Collective. Five years ago, in June 2019, we had our first networking meeting. It was about bringing together Pacific people in the private sector, in the business space. It didn’t matter if you were employed or self-employed; if you were in the private sector, you were welcome to our meetings. We started those meetings in 2019. 

We started some business development workshops off the back of those, which we called Pineapple Pie Networking Meetings. Sometimes it’s pineapple pie, sometimes it’s pani popo and other bits and pieces. It’s about bringing people together, trying to utilize each other’s services, or if we need goods or services, using each other. 

We’ve grown that group to over a hundred and twenty Pacific businesses or business people. 

When I changed industries and became a financial advisor, that was one of the projects I wanted to work on. It took me two years to get it off the ground. 

That was one of the projects I wanted to work on, creating a specific business collective. Two years after that, in 2021, this friend and I co-founded the Pacific People’s Trust. It was recognizing two things we’d learned in the previous two years of running the collective: 

1. Our Pacific people are lacking in financial literacy and financial capability. That was my area to work on. 

1. The other area, which was my colleague Sefa’s, was recognizing that a lot of our Pacific youth were struggling with pathways into either employment or training. He came from the tertiary education space, working at Polytech at ARA in the business development team. 

We created this trust to work on those two areas. My area was the financial capability program, and his area was the employment and training program. We launched our trust three years ago (2021). 

What ended up happening was our financial capability program has been running for the last three years, but we haven’t been able to get an employment and training program off the ground. We were working with MSD at one point, but unfortunately, it didn’t work out. 

We ended up partnering with the Tupu Aotearoa program here in Christchurch. Literacy Aotearoa runs that program on behalf of the Ministry of Pacific Peoples. Today, when you’re talking about career adventure, I wear three different hats. It’s also three different careers and three different income streams because I contract myself to our trust. 

We have a small government contract for the collective, and what’s ended up happening is my business, Moana Mortgages Plus, has become a side hustle because my time has evolved. I spend so much time now on these Pacific projects that my financial advice business has become more of a side hustle. It just pays for itself these days. 

I mainly work with first-time buyers. So those are my three hats. That’s my adventure so far. 

Transferable Skills 

Financial management knowledge touches at least two of those hats. It obviously hits the financial advice space, and that was what I wanted to utilize for the community space. There are only a handful of independent Pacific financial advisors in Christchurch—about five. 

There are a lot of Pacific people who work in the banks, but only a handful of us are outside of the banks. 

What I was trying to do, and I’m still trying to do today, is utilize our skills from the financial advice realm to help our people in the community space with financial literacy and capability. It’s not even about things that will help because it’s a conflict of interest. If we’re helping someone in the community space and then eventually, they’re ready to buy their first home, that transfers into a mortgage case for us, which transfers into commission for us. 

I guess it’s about trying to work out a way, and we do it for our trust, to manage that conflict of interest and make sure that any money generated from the community space is put into the trust or the community space, like another trust or whatever. 

But it’s also about trying to contract these financial advisors to work in the space because we’ve got industry knowledge. We know what’s happening in the banking sector, what the banks are up to, the insurers, the investments, and things like that. So we know what’s happening in the industry, and it’s about getting that knowledge into the community space. 

When it comes to the Business Collective, I guess the skill set in terms of running my own business for the last five years and even before that, I’ve had little side hustles. When I was employed as a project manager for quite a few years, I had, I don’t know, half a dozen side hustles. A lot of them failed. 

One was quite successful, in fact, two. If I had put the time in, you know, I was working full-time, but if I had put the time into those two side hustles, they probably would have gone somewhere, but I chose not to. I’ve had half a dozen side hustles before the financial advice realm, and then, you know, being a financial advisor for two years and thinking, no, stuff this, I’m going to go out on my own. 

It’s a skill set I can bring to the collective. 

These patterns represent bravery and being strong in the face of adversity. We strive to be persistent and positively challenge anything that threatens to alter, restrict, and put a barrier in the way of our desired pathway.

What was your defining moment?  What words of wisdom or change in heart, changed your stars?​

So when I was at uni, I was an immature ratbag. In the Students’ Association, we had a patron of our Asosi (Samoan for Association) named Mamea, also known as Bubsy. He was a huge community leader in the Pacific community, especially in the Samoan community, and he was our patron. 

I didn’t grow up Samoan; I grew up Pālagi, so I was very rebellious, questioning everything, and not always respectful. I was also very immature in terms of Takatāpui. He was a queen, in Samoan, he was fa’afafine. I was very immature back then. Nowadays, I would fight for him and the community. 

Back then, I was immature and a bit of a douchebag, but by the time I finished uni, we had become close. I had finally matured and started respecting him for what he had been doing for us as an Asosi, for me as a student, and for our community at large. 

Post-university, I got involved in the career space, trying to find my feet and grow my CV. I caught up with him one time, and he said to me, “You need to do something in the community space, Dante.” 

He encouraged me to go to this Ministry meeting. The Ministry facilitated this Canterbury Pacific Network meeting, and I went along after he’d nagged me for probably over a year. There were six or seven of us in the room, and I was the only one from the private sector. Everyone else was either from the government, charity, or similar sectors. I thought it was a cool meeting and loved the vibe. It stimulated my mind, thinking this would be a cool meeting to have for Pacific people in the business space and the private sector. That was the catalyst. It was Bubsy who continually nagged me to get involved in the Pacific community space and do whatever I could to help our Pacific people. He even told me the statistics showing we were falling behind in median income, home ownership, income from other sources, and net worth. We were going backwards and sat far below the national median in all those statistics. He was a defining person for me. 

He passed away, taken by the Big C—cancer. It was the saddest thing. I still choke up today even just talking about him because he was that influential on the trust, the collective, and I would argue Moana Mortgages. It wouldn’t even exist had he not been a part of my life. 

Here we are drawing inspiration from the Pūhoro pattern.  The pūhoro is used here to represent the strength, speed and agility needed to move forward and accomplish ones goals.

What future actions/recommendations do you have for those who want to be in a career like yours?​

So my push at the moment has been to see more Māori and Pacific financial advisors. I’m focusing on Pacific because that is my network, but I’ve been talking to a couple of people who work strongly in the Māori space and asking them what we can do to get more Māori young people considering this as a career path. 

The biggest action that I think anyone, whether young or old, who wants to consider financial advice should take is to talk to a financial advisor first. Get an understanding of what the industry is like. That’s probably your first step. 

A lot of people will talk to the police at those career expos before they become a police officer. I went to a Pacific Careers Expo with the trust hat on and tried to talk to kids about financial literacy. You know, “What do you guys know about KiwiSaver?” They didn’t care. None of them cared. All they cared about was the University of Canterbury, ARA Institute of Technology, and the Police. Those were the three busiest stalls. 

And I thought, we’ll change that and try to put a stall there for financial advisors. So, bringing together all the financial advisors that I know, we’ll have a stall and promote this career path to young people. So that would be the first step: talking to a financial advisor. Now, no one knows any financial advisors, hence why we need to create little collectives or networks of financial advisors, both Pacific and Māori. 

So that we can get in front of our people, and they will know someone at that point, you know, because at the moment we’re so few and far between. People don’t even know we exist. 

I think another action would be to do the Certificate in Financial Services, which is offered by Open Polytech, Massey, and the New Zealand College of Business. ARA was offering it at one point, but I don’t think they do anymore. 

But yeah, do the New Zealand Certificate in Financial Services. 

It will give you the core subjects, and then you can specialize by doing other modules in mortgages, insurance, or investments. 

The biggest thing that people need to realize is that you can either go into the industry as a commission-based advisor or on salary. The salary is alright because you’re trying to learn how to be a financial advisor, so you need cash flow because that’s the biggest problem with commission: cash flow. 

Get your feet on the ground, start building a client referral database, all that sort of stuff on salary, and then potentially switch into a commission-based role after that, so that the world’s your oyster and however hard you work is how much you’ll earn. 

A lot of young people don’t realize that some of the jobs out there as financial advisors are commission-based. It can be quite scary because of the cash flow management. It can also be a very rewarding industry, and it’s certainly an industry that Māori and Pacific can utilize for the community space, for financial literacy, and for financial capability programs. I think it’s really important. 

As a side note, there are all these different providers of financial capability programs in Ōtautahi, and I was thinking there must be a standardized way of delivering these programs. I came across it at like 1:00 AM, it was like a light bulb moment for me. I thought, there must be a standardized version of financial capability programming. 

I googled it, and lo and behold, on the NZQA website, there are financial capability NCEA credits. What shocked me is I clicked on the providers of those NCEA credits, listing all the high schools and tertiary institutes, and I thought, OK, so these financial capability credits exist. I then reached out to a few high schools and asked, “Are you guys delivering these credits? Where are they?” 

There’s no dedicated financial capability subject. And they said, for some of the high schools, they’re delivering them through the business studies course, or through accounting or economics. 

And I thought, well, that’s okay, but I would rather see that as a standalone subject, dedicated to financial capability. No one’s becoming economists. 

Very few people are becoming accountants. Not everyone’s going to get into business, but we are all going to touch finances and money. 

So why is it not a dedicated subject? What I’ve come down to is that I don’t think they have the teachers that can deliver those subjects as a standalone subject, and that’s where I think if we start training financial advisors who want to then become educators for whatever reason, or even bankers, people from the banking sector, business, or financial advisors… if they want a career change into helping our young people, they could become teachers in high schools delivering those courses. 

Yeah, I don’t know. It’s just my thoughts on it. But it was shocking to hear that there were financial capability NCEA credits out there. 

Success, best mentioned in the whakatauki “Tūwhitia te hopo, mairangatia te angitū!” Feel the fear and do it anyway!

What are some the failures/challenges in your life that have helped with your chosen career path? What are some memorable wins for your chosen path?​

Putting money into side hustles that haven’t eventuated. And then also with my business at the moment, it’s had some rocky roads. I went into business, went out on my own in September 2019, started to find my feet, and six months later, we were in lockdown (COVID lockdown). 

It’s just been tough running a business; you’ve got to hustle. It’s taken five years for me… I don’t need to do much advertising now, and people are referring others to me. But in those first couple of years, well, 2-3 years because of COVID, it was really tough. COVID really hammered my business. 

If you were in real estate or financial advice, especially in the mortgage space, coming out of COVID in the next 12 to 24 months, you made so much money. If you were a big dog, well-known and things like that, people were jumping to get into the housing market, so real estate agents and mortgage advisers made a lot of money during that period. 

For me, it was just about trying to build up. You have to start from scratch when you go out on your own. It’s been challenging, but there have been some big wins as well. 

I think the biggest win has been evolving my business. When I first entered the industry, I was only doing KiwiSaver advice and insurance. Then I did my mortgage course and picked up mortgages. Re-evaluating my business and deciding to focus more on the mortgage space, purely because I get more buzz out of helping first home buyers than any other facet of my mahi, has been the biggest driver. 

Memorable wins have probably been those first home buyers where we’ve journeyed for like three years, paid off 50 grand worth of debt, and then got them into their first home. Those are the memorable wins within my path. 

If you ever consider the industry, then you best hit me up because I’m helping people enter the industry right now. Whatever I can do to help, I will help, and even if it’s not you, if it’s another family member or a friend, I don’t care who it is.