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11 April 2025
The term "existential threat" gets used quite broadly, and I think it's often used when it's not really appropriate. This is a typology of how I think about four different types of "existential" threa…
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17 August 2023
I think about Y2K a lot when I think about Covid. As time goes on, most people seem to think Y2K was a storm in a teacup — and I suspect Covid risks the same fate. But that framing gets things backwar…
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21 October 2022
I'm preoccupied with existential risks — not because I think a catastrophe is likely, but because it's possible, and the stakes are everything. Toby Ord puts the odds at 1 in 6 this century. That's un…
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8 July 2022
Hurricane Camille hit in 1969 and narrowly missed New Orleans. When Katrina came in 2005, many who had lived through Camille didn't evacuate — and died. They'd learned the wrong lesson. I worry the qu…
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3 June 2022
Bonds have been performing terribly, yet I still call them defensive assets. Every asset class has bad years; regression to the mean is real; bond losses remain smaller than share losses; and your cap…
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25 February 2022
Consumer NZ is paving a road to hell with good intentions in the way it talks about personal insurance, and especially personal insurance advice. I'm a paying member and a fan — which is why it's so f…
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18 February 2022
Lots of people reassess their insurance after repaying the mortgage and cancel their income protection. I often think that's a mistake. Mortgage-free years are usually when you build the wealth that f…
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17 September 2021
When it comes to investing, I have a personal rule of thumb: if someone offers a high guaranteed return on an investment, I walk in the other direction. Bonds issued by Governments or reputable instit…
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30 July 2021
Term deposit returns can look dismal next to inflation — but that might still be the best place for your money. It depends on when you'll use it. If you need the money soon, prioritise return OF capit…
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4 June 2021
Every time I work with a client, I make a bald statement of fact. If you invest in growth-oriented investments, there WILL be times when the value of those investments drops. Sometimes significantly.…
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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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4 December 2020
The word "decide" traces back to Latin — "to cut", or to kill. Every decision kills other options you could have taken. Time is scarce. Money is scarce. Even Bill Gates makes trade-offs. It's trade-of…
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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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25 September 2020
I'm not naturally frugal. I love spending money and buying stuff. I've never gone overboard with spending. Initially that was because it wasn't really an option. But as time has gone on, I've found my…
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21 April 2020
Niceness does not equal goodness. Gavin de Becker's line has stuck with me. How often do we trust people on a gut read of "nice" or "credible"? Con-artists and psychopaths tend to be charming — that's…
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17 April 2020
For most of my clients I recommend widely-diversified, low-fee index funds. They're steady, sensible, and almost no one gets really rich from them. Investing in a business is one of the few things tha…
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31 March 2020
It's not fun being asset poor and cash poor. It's rarely fun to be asset rich and cash poor either. If you've got cash on hand right now, you're probably feeling better than most. But there are real r…
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27 March 2020
COVID-19 had me questioning a lot of things, including my long-standing devotion to index-based investing. In retrospect it felt like I could have picked the crash — so could I have? Probably not. The…
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7 February 2020
"Past performance is no indication of future performance." If you've looked at any investment product with proper disclosure, you'd be familiar with this refrain. It's a statement that's required by l…
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20 December 2019
It's easy to think about insurance in binary terms — you have it or you don't. But there's a huge difference between a 4-week and a 13-week waiting period, between $100,000 and $1 million of life cove…
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29 November 2019
When it comes to the things that really matter, focus on what you can control. Checking your KiwiSaver balance every week isn't one of them — and yes, I'm a hypocrite about this when it comes to Trump…
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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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31 May 2019
You'll never have the "right" amount of insurance, because you're dealing with uncertainty. You can only tell what you needed with hindsight or a crystal ball. For most people the best case is paying…
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5 April 2019
I'm very sensitive to conflicts of interest — I've built my own business specifically to avoid them. Which is why it might surprise you that I'm a strong advocate for commission as the way insurance a…
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22 February 2019
Warren Buffett is endlessly quoted about investing, but his most important lesson isn't about money. In a 2001 speech at the University of Georgia he said you measure success in life by how many of th…
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12 November 2018
Parents help their kids in obvious ways — education, deposits on homes. But there's a subtler one worth naming: underwriting risks. A parent in a sound financial position can take the place of a traum…
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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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3 September 2018
A friend's cancer diagnosis sent me back to Stephen Jay Gould's essay on being told his own disease had a median survival of eight months. Most people would read that as "I'll be dead in eight months"…
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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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16 July 2018
People sometimes tell me they don't want to take any risks with their investments. I have to tell them all investments have risks — even "safe" ones like term deposits and cash under the mattress. For…
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18 June 2018
Every so often I meet an insurance adviser who waxes lyrical on trauma insurance — there's something almost religious about it. In person, it's compelling. This article is an antidote. Trauma insuranc…
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11 April 2018
How do people respond when the unthinkable happens? How should we respond? Amanda Ripley's terrific book The Unthinkable looks at extreme circumstances and how people actually act — with guidance for…
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15 March 2018
As a general rule, I say "no" to level premiums for personal insurance. Your insurance needs should reduce over time, so if you select level premiums, you may end up locking yourself into unnecessary…
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21 December 2017
George Clooney once gave 14 of his closest friends $1 million each, in cash, in designer suitcases. It sounds bonkers. But being generous with the people who matter to you probably pays dividends if y…
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15 December 2017
If you need personal insurance, it's tempting to go direct to an insurer or use a comparator like Life Direct. I don't recommend it. Policies look similar but differ in ways that matter: wording, excl…
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21 August 2017
If you've engaged a financial adviser, you'll be familiar with risk tolerance questionnaires — and robo-advisers lean on them even harder. Here's a dirty little secret: they're not nearly as valuable…
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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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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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11 June 2017
We can organise our lives to make good luck more likely and bad luck less costly. Invert the standard risk-management moves — eliminate, reduce, transfer, retain — and you get a framework for opportun…
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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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12 May 2017
I'm a HUGE advocate for insurance — most working people should carry some. But I'm also a big advocate for self-insuring where you can, and a message I don't see often enough is that your insurance ne…
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13 April 2017
Plenty of people are under-insured. But plenty are also over-insured — paying expensive premiums for cover they no longer need. Reducing cover is trickier than it sounds, and most advisers have financ…
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12 April 2017
In most of life, the best things go to those who hustle. Spend more, get more. Investing is the inversion: the riches go to those who wait, and performance and fees are inversely related. You’re rewar…
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27 March 2017
If you pick stocks, you aren't playing in a Little League. You're playing against the best full-time professionals in the world — the equivalent of stepping onto a tennis court with Federer, or a rugb…
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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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20 February 2016
One of the best forms of good luck is the absence of bad luck. I've been lucky in that sense — no major health issues, no tragedies. The defensive side of managing luck is every bit as important as co…
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24 January 2016
Paul Graham, having sold a startup and become wealthy, started paying attention to how fortunes are actually lost. Not through excessive expenditure — it’s hard to blow a fortune on luxuries without n…
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10 October 2015
I'm a huge advocate of most forms of insurance — general insurance for the house, contents, and car; personal insurance for life, income, total and permanent disability, and trauma. It's a foundationa…
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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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6 February 2015
Do ALL people need life, trauma, total and permanent disability, or income protection insurance? No. Do MOST people need insurance? Yes. These policies are typically about making sure the people who d…