A two-day financial education event at the Fairmont Hotel Dubai is bringing together wellness advocates and real estate professionals to help Overseas Filipino Workers rethink how they approach property investment — starting from the inside out.
The Property Decision: Financial Wellness Masterclass opened February 27 at the venue’s Gulf Auditorium, with its second session scheduled for later today, February 28. The program draws on the combined expertise of Elizabeth Ventura, president of Anchor Land Holdings and a financial wellness advocate, and Fahed Aladdin, CEO of Vartur Real Estate Brokerage, with actress and inner wellness advocate Maxene Magalona lending a reflective dimension to the event.
Magalona anchored her session on three pillars — awareness, alignment, and abundance — arguing that the psychological habits OFWs develop while working abroad, often rooted in financial survival, can become obstacles to long-term wealth building. She framed investment readiness as inseparable from emotional readiness, suggesting that fear-driven financial behavior and peace-driven financial behavior lead to vastly different outcomes.
“Do the inner work. Believe in yourself. Attract the blessings you deserve, and invest in the things that no one can take away from you, because financial wellness is mental wellness too,” she told attendees.
Ventura took a more technical approach, introducing what she called the Proper-TY Decision Formula — a total yield framework designed to cut through market hype and expose the structural flaws she said plague many real estate investment decisions. The formula breaks evaluation into four areas: whether demand for a property is genuinely sustainable, whether yield figures account for actual operating costs rather than gross returns alone, whether the asset is backed by capable management, and whether income streams are predictable enough to reduce financial stress over time.
On the question of risk, Ventura was direct: “Predictability and disciplined asset management are central to mitigating financial risk.”
She warned against hype-driven purchasing and stressed that an investment opportunity only becomes real income when operator discipline and asset quality work together. Location-based demand, transport access, tourism integration, and professional property management were cited as ecosystem factors that determine whether a development is viable beyond its initial pitch.
The masterclass positioned property acquisition not as a transaction but as a decision requiring both emotional groundedness and rigorous financial analysis — a pairing the organizers said is particularly relevant for OFW professionals managing significant remittance income with limited access to on-the-ground market guidance.
