compound growth

1. 20 January 2026

   Making the invisible visible

   “There’s a gap between knowing something intellectually and truly believing it. Visualising your spending, your financial projections, or your mood data can close that gap — making abstract knowledge…

2. 30 December 2022

   Top posts of 2022

   2022 wasn't the best year of my life, and it wasn't the best year for this blog. It didn't get as much of my mental bandwidth as other years — I only published a little over 30 articles. Here are the…

3. 24 May 2019

   The myopia of compound interest

   Compound interest is magical, but there's a myopia around it. The Barefoot Investor and others lean on 10% annual returns to make the "start early or you're sunk" case — at 5% the chart looks very dif…

4. 29 March 2018

   Headwinds and tailwinds: Every dollar is easier than the next

   When you start building wealth, you face headwinds. It can feel like you're getting nowhere. But the headwinds eventually turn into tailwinds — and every dollar of wealth is easier to build than the l…

5. 8 March 2018

   Build wealth by being lazy!

   You're lazy sometimes. I know this because you're human. The trick is to use that laziness — or, more charitably, behavioural inertia — as a feature rather than a bug. Set things up once so wealth-bui…

6. 1 March 2018

   Financial advice for 16 year olds (and the rest of us)

   Some high-level financial advice for 16-year-olds, and anyone who still feels young. The biggest investment in your early adulthood is in yourself. One of the best (or worst) financial decisions you'l…

7. 10 February 2017

   A 30 year mortgage is too long

   Note: my views on this have evolved — I'm more comfortable with debt now and less inclined to treat a mortgage as an obstacle to investing. The original argument was that a 30-year term leaves too lit…

8. 29 July 2016

   Biases that keep you from saving money

   Two biases stop us saving: present bias (we weight now over later) and exponential-growth bias (we underestimate what a dollar today becomes). KiwiSaver's opt-out, locked-in design fights both.