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16 September 2022
A follow-up to my 2019 “How I money”, showing how my wife and I actually structure our savings, investments, insurance, and spending three years on. Don’t treat this as a guide — it’s illustrative onl…
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11 February 2022
When people are thinking about cancelling or reducing their personal insurances because of short-term cash flow pressure, I try to get them to s-l-o-w the decision down. Step back. Think big picture a…
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18 June 2021
It's easy to think you're either spending money or saving it. In reality, financial decisions rarely fall cleanly into one bucket. Businesses "spend" on wages and tools that are really investments in…
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12 March 2021
The idea that there's one specific right way to invest, or manage your financial affairs, is kind of weird. Yes, I give clients specific recommendations — but that's what I'd do in their shoes. In rea…
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22 January 2021
Asset allocation — how your investments are split up — is really, really, really important. Get it right and you can make plenty of other mistakes and still be fine. Get it wrong and you're choosing b…
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27 November 2020
The future is uncertain, but plenty within it isn't really. Community transmission of COVID, a market downturn, dying at some point — these are when-not-if events, not if-they-happen events. Much of g…
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2 October 2020
Involuntary retirement — losing a role and not returning to the workforce — can have a huge financial and emotional impact. Playing it "safe" by staying put in one role for decades can actually be ris…
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18 September 2020
Finance is important — it wins wars, and it helps allocate capital to where it's most valuable. There are two broad forms of investing: putting money into creating new capability (think Paypal, Tesla,…
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11 September 2020
When I give financial advice, one of the most important questions I ask is about job security. It's easy to think about this in terms of your current role. But there's a second, often more important f…
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14 August 2020
I've watched loads of videos on knife skills. Turns out, advanced knife skills only really matter if you're a professional chopping the same things over and over. For the rest of us, paying attention…
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15 May 2020
Many people think they lack financial literacy when what they really lack is financial confidence. In my experience, with clients and with friends and loved ones, the issue is much more often confiden…
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6 March 2020
I rarely talk numbers on this blog, which might be surprising since it's mainly about money — and I LOVE spreadsheets. Numbers change, past performance isn't future performance, and precision can make…
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28 February 2020
What does "retirement" actually mean to you? For many of the people I talk to, early retirement isn't really about stopping work — it's about changing their relationship to work, or getting freedom to…
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14 February 2020
If you engage a financial adviser, you might think the decision will leave you better off financially. Not necessarily. I often encourage clients to spend more, or point out they can afford to earn le…
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24 January 2020
Money is emotional, and rarely talked about candidly — which is a recipe for disaster. Borrowing from the sex-positivity frame: who cares what's "normal"? If someone's spending gives them pleasure, do…
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18 October 2019
"Wealth" isn't just about money, and "success" is personal. Don't over-complicate your financial life — make it boring so the rest of your life can be interesting. Everyone has a financial plan, wheth…
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16 August 2019
How would you invest if you were 60 with $5 million and spent $100,000 a year? Some of my clients in this position sit heavily in defensive assets. Others sit 80-90% in growth assets. Both are right —…
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12 July 2019
I have clients worth tens of thousands of dollars, and clients worth tens of millions of dollars. I find it much easier to advise clients with millions rather than thousands. As a general rule, the we…
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28 June 2019
The most valuable thing I do as a financial adviser isn't running numbers. It's having conversations. The right questions uncover what a client actually cares about, which is usually the hardest and m…
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14 June 2019
Kiwi personal finance forums are full of smart people endlessly debating which fund or platform is "best". I get frustrated with those debates, because they're operating in shades of good. Get your as…
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17 May 2019
When it comes to money, I'm a "set and forget" kind of guy — one sign of a good strategy is that you can leave it alone. What you should review, every so often or when life shifts, is whether the plan…
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12 April 2019
I have tremendous faith in resourceful people. The clients who end up in a good position, financially and otherwise, tend to be resourceful — not because they started with much, but because they can s…
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15 February 2019
My son is starting to get into video games. In many games, you can choose between "easy mode" and "hard mode". Sometimes I think we unnecessarily put our lives on hard mode, when we'd lead much more m…
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9 October 2018
The 4% rule says you can safely withdraw 4% of your retirement portfolio each year — so multiply your desired spending by 25 to get your number. I don't like it. Retirement planning is not the place f…
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16 September 2018
The most important thing to get right when investing in financial assets is asset allocation. It refers to how your funds are invested across different classes, such as shares and bonds. If you get th…
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6 August 2018
I'll start with a prediction. At some point in the future, the sharemarket will go down. It might go down in a big way. That's as accurate a prediction as anyone can make — timing and scale are out of…
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8 March 2018
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…
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1 March 2018
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…
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29 December 2017
Once you've captured the employer match and the Government contribution, the tangible benefits of putting more into KiwiSaver largely stop. So why does my wife contribute 8% of her income? Behavioural…
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27 October 2017
Many people want to get to a position where they can "live off the interest" in retirement. It's a laudable goal, but for most people it's unrealistic, and aiming for it creates unnecessary pressure.…
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17 August 2017
Retirement is often a euphemism for being displaced from the workforce — and involuntary unemployment is one of the few things with an enduring negative impact on life satisfaction. Career risk is rea…
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11 August 2017
The FIRE movement — financial independence, retire early — is alluring. The core lesson is simple: increase your savings rate, live frugally, and you can retire decades early. I'm sympathetic to it, a…
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19 June 2017
Many insurance advisers provide terrific advice — but not always. Two red flags worth watching for: when the adviser has recommended the same level of life insurance cover for both you and your partne…
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15 May 2017
Many people don't think they have a financial plan. They're wrong. Even without clear goals or articulated strategy, you're acting as if you have one — maybe spending more than you earn, maybe skippin…
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1 May 2017
Retirement planning is shot through with uncertainty — your costs, your health, whether NZ Super will exist as we know it, what your investments return. Zoom out further and radical technologies, from…
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11 March 2017
Young professionals at the start of their careers face a genuinely different financial situation from people nearing retirement. Different circumstances, different needs, different objectives — which…
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14 July 2016
After working in Australia for ten years, I have a fair amount of money locked away in an Australian superannuation fund. As a resident of New Zealand, I have the ability to transfer these funds into…
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14 July 2016
Life insurance advice is almost cliche: if the client dies, they want the mortgage paid off. That's often the start and end of the conversation. But the mortgage is a red herring. The real question is…
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9 September 2015
The things most likely to kill us aren't swashbuckling. Turbulence and close calls get the heart racing, but heart disease is the leading cause of death — and the risks driving it are sitting on the c…
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15 December 2014
If you're in your late twenties or thirties, the odds that you'll die in a given year are very low — less than 0.15% for men, less than 0.07% for women. Pretty good odds. But in a group of 300 friends…
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5 December 2014
Common advice is to save a fixed percentage of your income every year for retirement, starting as early as possible. It's reasonable in the abstract. But it doesn't really match how life actually work…