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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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18 March 2022
Before we could store food properly, the best place to store surplus was in the stomachs of friends, family, and neighbours — and they'd reciprocate. Social capital is one of the most important forms…
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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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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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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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10 July 2020
What is money? Textbooks call it a medium of exchange and a store of value. Both are true — but money is also a time travel device. Borrowing brings future income into the present. Investing and savin…
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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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22 November 2019
Frugality is great — if it's mindful, and aligned with your values. But focus purely on savings rate and you can miss the forest for the trees. My wife and I joke that you've got to spend money to sav…
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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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7 June 2019
New Zealand and Australia have very different approaches to funding pensions. Despite many other similarities between our countries, you can consider us at opposite ends of the spectrum on this set of…
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24 May 2019
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…
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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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14 September 2018
Paying off the mortgage ASAP is usually the smartest move — a guaranteed, tax-free, risk-free return. But I often recommend clients also put some excess income into investments: it builds liquid asset…
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13 August 2018
Geoffrey Miller's book *Spent* has probably saved me thousands of dollars. Its central point — "the fundamental consumerist delusion" — is that other people care less about the products we display tha…
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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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29 March 2018
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…
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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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30 July 2017
Excessive investment fees are "a tax on smart people who don't realise their propensity for doing stupid things" — a line from a Freakonomics episode that cuts close to how I think about my job as a f…
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27 June 2017
If there's one figure to focus on when it comes to your finances, it's your net worth — assets minus liabilities. From that perspective, a dollar towards debt is the same as a dollar into savings. Rep…
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23 May 2017
My kids pulled out the Monopoly board recently and it struck me how narrow a view of commerce the game offers — buy property, collect rent, hope for capital gains, win by impoverishing everyone else.…
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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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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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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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18 September 2016
If someone asked you to calculate your net worth, you'd add up your assets, subtract your liabilities, and get a number. But for a younger person, that calculation misses the biggest asset of all: the…
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29 July 2016
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.
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24 October 2015
If you can't afford to buy a home in the current property market, don't despair. You can still build wealth and end up in a good long-term financial position. Owning a home is a legitimate goal for ma…
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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…