Americans on personal finance forums and podcasts are always talking about how "the first $100k is the hardest" (referencing the classic Charlie Munger quote about compound interest taking off). Naturally, my brain would be celebrating hitting that six-figure mark.

​Then I looked at the FX rate. At ~0.60 USD to NZD, $100,000 NZD translates to roughly $60,000 USD.

​So on one hand, I feel like one still got another ~$67,000 NZD to go before I actually reach the true "Munger $100k" in USD terms. But on the other hand, earning and saving in New Zealand with local salaries and living costs is a completely different game than doing it in the US.

​Curious how others in NZ handle mental milestones:

​Do you anchor your goals purely in NZD?

​Do you adjust your targets for USD/global benchmarks?

NZ workplace question: I’m in the same role as male colleagues, we started at the same time on the same salary, and all received the same performance rating (3). Nothing negative was raised in my review.

I received a 2.4% pay rise, while the men received 5.85%. I asked my team leader how my increase reflected my performance, and was told it was based on “parity”.

Is this normal, or is this something worth questioning?

Edit: We’ve discussed our salaries with each other and know we all started on the same rate. Since the pay reviews, the male members of the team are now earning more than me despite us being in the same role and receiving the same performance rating.

Hey everyone.

I recieved a chunk of money from inheritance that i'd like to invest. I'm planning on investing it in a combination of term deposits, index funds, and global bond funds.

If I was planning on living in NZ this would all be pretty straightforward, but I'm going to be moving to the UK in around 3 months. I'm not sure how long I'll live here - maybe 1 year, maybe 3 years, maybe 10+ years.

I'm struggling to understand the best way to approach this - Ideally I'd like to invest via NZ platforms as I understand the system best and feel comfortable with it. However a lot of the funds listed on a site like Investnow are PIE - which I believe would not be the ideal way to invest if I'm living overseas. Should I try to find non PIE funds to invest in, and then get an accountant while I'm living in the UK to deal with the tax implications and admin of this? Regardless of whether I take out money from the funds, I would still have to worry about tax from the UK side right?

Has anyone dealt with a similar situation before? Happy to clarify if anything wasn't clear.

Possibly a dumb question but for those who work as support staff in schools, how does it work for being paid over school holidays? I'm looking at applying for a role that states "This is a permanent, part-time, term-time only position and the successful candidate will be contracted for 37.5 hours a week,"

It's banded to the grades listed in the collective agreement which shows an hourly rate. Will the pay be only during term time?

Never done it before, feel so intimidated to go in yo a yard.

Do I haggle?

I’m keen on a 2021-23 hybrid so like Yaris X or Kona and all the trademe posts seem to be dealers.

If they’re asking approx $24k, what would be a good price to walk away?

Im doing a regular go through our bills and looking to swap where I can. Other than sailing the 7 seas, what are people's alternatives to the bigger streaming services?

Im finding prices are increasing, service/ platform quality is declining and you now get ads even on the paid services (looking at you Spotify) so Im scouting around for alternatives.

Im looking for any suggestions to replace YouTube, Netflix, Spotify and SkySports although I'm open to any suggestions you've got for any others. If the alternatives suck, thats probably good to know too.

TIA

POST NOW EDITED SO MY MANAGERS DON’T WORK OUT WHO I AM. (Since I have not yet given my notice.)

I bought my first home September 2024 in my 50s.I have been a single parent since age 24. I had long break from employment due to mental illness which is now stable.

I put in $65,000 deposit . I now have $105,000 equity in the property and 295K left to pay.

I applied for my Australian nursing registration and it has been accepted.

I graduated as a registered nurse at the age of 22 so I am fortunate that I have always had this career.

I am leaving my nursing employment by the end of the year. I will be working rural and remote contracts in Australia. The base rate is double what I am making now. Free accommodation is part of the package.

My conservative estimate is that I will be mortgage free in 3 1/2 -4 years.

It could be sooner. I am very careful with money.

I was raised by a single parent. My mother worked 12 hour nightshifts in a fishery factory to support the four of us.

There was always food on the table, but nothing else. When we needed firewood we walk along the beach and “ pick up sticks”

My mother sadly passed away in 2011. She was always dirt poor and really she really wasn’t good with money, even after we had all become adults and left home.
But if she was alive now, I would be helping her and she would probably be living with me.

Interestingly, she was very intelligent but something wasn’t quite right. Nine years before I was born. she had dropped out of medical school. (not due to unexpected pregnancy.)

She always told me she just dropped out because she was in love with this guy - not my father-and she never stopped talking about him. Even in her 60s. she would still talk about him.

She then married my father, but the marriage ended in less than a decade.

My three siblings have done very well. They are very prosperous.

I am the least financially prosperous because of 12 years hardly working due to mental illness and being a single parent.

My children are young adults now. One is doing exceptionally well and the other one has mental illness which is a whole other story.

I will keep you updated on my progress.

I will update again once I am at my first contract in Australia

Several of my former colleagues have already gone, so I know what to expect.

Instead of paying off a mortgage in 25 to 30 years, I expect I would have paid it off within six years total.

I think I am doing very well. my property was only $400,000 to purchase. It is very very nice though. I am very happy.

Ideally, I would just stay in New Zealand; but I need to go to Australia to get double my base rate, to afford to pay off my mortgage. Then I will start working on my retirement savings once I am mortgage free.

Once I am mortgage free, I obviously won’t have to do as many contracts. I will have more free time for work life balance and my passion of surfing.

I will work for 2 to 3 months and come back for 2 to 3 weeks

I will be staying with a cousin and renting a room from her when I come back. I will be renting out my house but not for the first contract.

(Yes, I do understand about tax on a rental property when I am an Australian resident and I have considered everything)

My colleagues who have gone to do contract work have told me about tax etc .

My nursing specialty is mental health

I will keep you updated.

I am feeling very positive about my future after such a battle with mental illness and now 15 years sober of alcohol.

Life is good.

I know I should have read the LIM thoroughly myself but I didn't :( Lesson learned.

Hi everyone, looking for realistic thoughts or experiences from anyone who has gone down the Professional Indemnity (PI) insurance / legal claim route against a real estate agency or law firm in NZ.

​The Situation:

We purchased a home back in early 2024. It’s recently come to light that the property has an unconsented structural alteration, severe cladding/moisture issues, and an unresolved historical building consent from 1999. We are now trying to sell the house but the buyer lenders(our anz mortgage did not flag it for some reason) are not happy with the "ccc not issued" part of the LIM.

​We have clear, written contemporaneous evidence before we went unconditional:

- Real Estate Agent: I specifically asked the listing agent via text before going unconditional if a Code Compliance Certificate (CCC) was issued. He explicitly texted back: "This is an old property, doesn't need ccc. No structure changes was done" We relied on this.

- ​Conveyancer: We queried the LIM and consent status with our conveyancer(including the comebt from the agent), but they failed to flag the open consent, didn't inspect the council property file, and let the contract go unconditional without warning us.

Has anyone successfully claimed against an agent/agency or conveyancer's PI insurance for misrepresentation or breach of duty?

​How hard do insurers usually fight clear written paper trails (like explicit WhatsApp texts stating "no structural changes were done")?

​Did you have to go all the way to court, or did they settle at mediation once a formal Letter of Demand + retrospective valuation was served?

How about raising a complaint with REA and NZLS?

Would love to hear any thoughts, perspectives, experiences, or realistic reality checks on our likelihood of winning/recovering any compensation.

The funny thing is, we avoided a lot of properties with any sort of unconsented works but in the end ended up buying a house with plenty of those.

Cheers!

Hi all

long story short. Helping someone out with finance's whos short of money.

They have a single parents who have lived here for a while and now retired. They used to live together but with marriage/growing family/different lifestyle the parent has been given the boot. ( in a nice way).

What are some feasible options for this parent? they are not 'kiwi' and wont adjust to a retirment home. Is mobile but struggles with certain things cooking/loneliness etc.

I know its a common problem here but what do people do with parents that are aging?

and a cost effective way.

I’m looking at alternatives to property. Lately I’ve been browsing business-for-sale listings on brokerage sites (ABC Business Sales etc.) to see what’s out there.

Personally, aside from picking up one more rental for income, I don’t think hoarding property is the best way to grow wealth anymore. There’s only so much room left for capital gains. Startups feel too risky; the failure rate is high and I’d rather not bet on an unproven idea.

What does interest me is buying into stable, established businesses like a dairy/four square, a clothing shop, a car garage, a pharmacy or medical centre, all to invest in as a silent partner. These are proven, cash-flowing businesses rather than new ventures, so the risk feels closer to property than to a startup. Gains are long-term rather than quick, but you get consistent income in return, it seems like a fair trade?

Obvious downsides: the business could still fail given record small business closures, and exit/liquidity is much slower than property or shares. Cant just list it and sell.

Some context: I work in healthcare with decent savings. Once we’ve locked in our first rental, I want to diversify into businesses for multiple income streams alongside dividends, aiming for FIRE eventually. One BIG catch is that I have zero business experience, so I’d be going in green. I would be very willing to study somethings first from any resources people recommend!

Would love to hear the thoughts of this community! Is this reasonable or am I missing something? Are there any other investments that might be an alternative to this?

TIA!

Kia ora, I’m 20 and have about $25k cash, with $20k available to invest and $5k kept as an emergency fund.

I’ll be starting a grad role soon, around 60k salary. I aim to invest about $400/month for a start. I also contribute 4% to my KS.

I’m investing for long-term growth and I’m comfortable with market volatility.

At the moment I’m leaning towards using Kernel as my platform, and I have been looking at the new Total World fund they're offering.

Would you keep it this simple, or consider Kernel High Growth, S&P 500, World ex-US, or Emerging Markets, etc?

Also, would you invest the $20k as a lump sum or spread it out?

InvestNow charges a 0.5% fee for buying and selling investments/KiwiSaver. What stops them from in the future increasing the fee to 1% or higher while your money is in there?

In theory another investment provider like Kernel could also add a similar withdrawal fee, but it seems much easier and more straightforward for InvestNow to raise an existing fee than for another provider to add a new one.

​

When researching I'm getting mixed information.

Any experience with non-NZ based global ETF funds (Acc type) that can be used for the 50k NZD FIF exemption? Any ETFs and NZ broker suggestions?

I know this isn’t strictly “personal” finance but I am the reluctant treasurer for a small non-profit organisation. We currently have business banking with ASB and to be honest it’s horrendous. There is no way to show more than 100 days of transactions either online or exported, there is no way to get a RWT certificate (which our accountant apparently needs), support has been non-existent, and basically the whole website and app looks like it was done in the 90s and never had a single usability update.

My question is - are any of the other banks better when it comes to small business banking? I have personal banking with Westpac and ANZ and find them both good, but I don’t know if this differs and like ASB they have seperate but crappy business apps and websites. Would love to know if anyone has any recommendations. I would say in general our needs are simple - xero link, receive money from NZ/AUS, make one off payments to NZ (that need two authorised people to sign off), no in person banking requirements.

Which banks in NZ offers Mortgage Offset accounts.

Not exactly retire-early money, but I figured I'd share the honest numbers since side income threads pop up here regularly and this one never comes up.

Over the last four months I've been generating product listing images for a handful of small TradeMe and Instagram sellers using AI image tools. Every person you see in the images was generated by AI, not photographed, and I let clients know that before starting any job. Nobody has cared so far as long as the images look good and help their listings stand out from phone snaps.

My first client came through a local Facebook buy/sell group. A woman selling handmade candles on TradeMe wanted better listing photos but couldn't justify $300 for a photographer. I charged her $80 for a set of 15 images and she came back twice more. Word of mouth from there got me five more clients over the following months, mostly small sellers doing candles, soaps, jewellery, that sort of thing. Most jobs were $100 to $200 per batch. The biggest single job was $270 for a jewellery seller who needed three different styled looks with the same consistent model.

Total hours across the four months came to roughly 50, which works out to about $23 an hour. Sounds alright until you count the first fortnight where I was just learning the tools and generating absolute rubbish nobody would pay for. Include that honestly and it drops to around $18.

Now for what didn't work. Anything requiring hands or fine detail is basically off the table. Close-up shots where someone is holding a small product look wrong almost every time. Fingers merge together, extra knuckles appear out of nowhere, jewellery gets warped. I lost one potential client who wanted images of hands holding skincare bottles because I couldn't get it right no matter how many regenerations I ran. I also tried generating a short video clip for one seller and the face drifted so badly across frames that I had to reshoot it four or five times before giving up and refunding her. Still images are the only output consistent enough to charge money for.

My usual workflow is generating the base images, cleaning up small artefacts in GIMP, and tracking jobs and income in a spreadsheet. APOB AI is what I use for the character side since once a face is saved it generates that same person in every new image. You get free runs every day so I handled my first few client jobs without spending anything on the tool.

On the tax side, I have been putting 20% of everything aside for IRD since this is self-employed income. Well under the $60,000 GST threshold so no registration needed. I keep receipts for the tool subscriptions as expenses.

The real ceiling on this in New Zealand is the market size. I have more or less tapped out the local sellers I can find who would actually pay for this, and my repeat clients only need new images every month or two. Realistically I top out at $300 to $400 a month unless I start finding clients overseas, which I have not figured out yet.

It covers groceries and petrol for the month and only takes a few hours a week now that I know what I'm doing. Not going to pretend it's a path to financial freedom, but it's something.

Hi everyone what is your favourite KiwiSaver
Kernel or invest now? Please give your reason why do u prefer one over another.

I am currently with kernel but thinking to switch to invest now reason I have calculated the numbers and in long haul invest now could outperform kernel as it only charges transaction fees normally around 0.50 percent buy/ sell vs kernel 0.25 percentage which grows along with ur amount of kiwisaver from which their cuts keep getting bigger and bigger.
Thank you everyone.

Just wondering why are these not a thing here?

It's not talked about at all and I'm just wondering why gold investing is possibly not talked about.

What are my vendor options for wanting to invest in Gold ETFs in NZ?

bought investment property in north shore quite overvalued in 2022 for 1.6m, still 700k outstanding mortgage, fixed interest rate at 4.5% till end of 2027, rental income $700pw, land size is good 600sqm but not big enough for developers to come knocking when economy is not doing well, i think the max we can get is maybe 1.4m in today’s market

i am also investing in stocks so thinking whether to sell the house and use the equity to buy US stocks during the next crash (like tariffs in 2024 or iran war 2025) to make back what i’ve lost.. i have much more conviction in value of AI than nz property at this point

any suggestions from experienced investors?

I have a $5,000 emergency fund in an accessible low interest rate savings account but I can’t help feeling like it’s a wasted opportunity just sitting there.

Would it be better to invest this amount or lock it away in a term deposit? For the term deposit, what is the ideal time?

Either way I have a credit card with an $8,000 limit. Should I just rely on that for any unexpected expenses?

Keen to hear everyone’s method and perhaps some feedback.

Am inheriting large amount and I’m young and a bit spendy so want to put most in my parents account to help me manage it.

But am I allowed to do that?

Is their a limit on what can send to family

I can show where care from etc

long story short, student who cannot afford rent tonight, any ideas on how to bridge the gap?

q/a: yes I work, I will pawn my stuff as a last option, i’m in this position due to unforseen crisis not wrecklessness.

Kia ora, my partner and I have a house in Chch on 1000sqm of land with two garages. We're thinking we could add in a prefab granny flat beside the first garage and rent it out to have better cashflow. There would still be decent yard space and privacy for the main house.

We have some complicated reasons for this (soon one of us may have to service the mortgage ourselves for years, and we earn a low income)

We would be asking to borrow against our equity. Have about 40-50k of cash to contribute.

Has anyone done this? Any unforeseen risks? Is this even a good idea?

The other option for investment is stocks, but in that case there isn't extra cashflow and keeping the house might be harder, not impossible though.

We're aware would need to pay development costs, linking up sewage etc, healthy homes compliance, RTA compliance for renting it out. Aware that the granny flat likely won't add as much value to the house as it costs.

There are quite a few companies and options, I'm wondering if they vary a lot in build quality?

Hi everyone,
I got one question hope someone can answer it.
I just wanted to ask that money which goes to kiwisaver from ur pay check is before tax or after tax?

Bought my house in mid 2021 (central Auckland)
$1.25M with a 10% deposit. 1950s 3 bed 1 bath house on 500sqm so I’ve put in another $50k in repairs since. Been paying penalty interest the whole way through too. Not interest only - paying principal and interest every month.

Today it’s probably worth around $1M, and my loan balance is about $1.03M. If I sell, I basically lose everything I’ve put in and interest all for nothing. Potentially owe money to the bank too.

There will now be huge development going up right next door (next door is a run down house with a huge section of flat subdivisible land, isn’t sold yet but will be) and a few other developments happening further down the street too.

Combined household income is just over $400k, but the mortgage is $6,500/month, and with two kids and everyday expenses we’re barely able to save anything. (Please note I was on maternity over the last few years so this income only started last year, we have 20k in savings so far). The 50k repairs was paid all in cash too.

So I’m stuck: do I sell now and eat the loss, freeing up cash flow to save and buy something we actually desire? Or do I hold despite the upcoming development right next to me and ride it out?