The longer you take to pay off your debt, the more it will cost you. This is why having a debt is an emergency. So you have to make room in your budget to pay your debt off as fast as possible. If you are managing several debts, the fastest way to pay off your debt is to pay off the debt with the highest interest rate first.
Here are some recent blog articles related to Debt that will get you started.
How Much Money Do You Have Left?
I want you to do a quick exercise. I want you to work out how much money you have earnt for your entire life. Adding your income for the last year, back to what you earned when you were 14 years old. Add it all together. (You can log onto IRD to get a summary of earnings for the last…
Everyday Investment Advice: Is it Any Good?
Sometimes it’s easier to identify bad advice than it is to identify good advice. I find this to be especially true when discussing investing in general- and even more so when talking about investing in shares or index funds. I thought I would discuss some of the advice I have come across over the years and share with you some…
The Myth of Bad Spending
When we talk about spending money it’s usually in absolutes. There’s good spending and bad spending. Spending money that you have budgeted for on healthy food is good and spending money on daily coffee is bad. Impulsive purchasing of consumer items and clothing is going to kill you in your sleep. That’s bad spending. But is it really this simple…
Longheld Myths about the Share Market
Certain myths seem to persist over time. For instance- there’s the myth that there is a dark side to the moon. I blame Pink Floyd for this one! There is no dark side to the moon- it’s just the far side. Which has the same light and dark as the side we can see. The share market is like the…
Should You Pay Down the Mortgage Early or Invest Instead?
Whether you should pay down your mortgage faster, or invest instead, is one of the longest-running debates in personal finance. What should you do with any extra money that you might have- pay off your mortgage, or invest? There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to both sides. Sure, you can be completely analytical and run the numbers to get an…
Where Should You Invest Your Hard Earned Money?
One of the most asked questions, when it comes to investing, is generally along the vein of “I have X amount of dollars, where should I invest it”. And it’s a hard question to answer with just that much information. There are two other pieces of information that you need to know when deciding where to invest your money. One…
Get Your Personal Finances Sorted in Five Stages
It takes time to get your personal finances sorted. And often you don’t know where to start. And the thing is that no one can really show you how you should sort your personal finance, after all, personal finance is exactly that- Personal. However, there are several key stages in personal finance that you do need to get sorted. These…
Creating an InvestNow Portfolio: Let’s get things Started
When it comes to DIY investing in New Zealand it’s hard to look past the InvestNow platform. And there’s a good reason for that. InvestNow has zero fees and you can start investing a minimum investment amount is $50, when part of a Regular Investment Plan, or $250 for one-off investments. InvestNow is a fund platform that offers you access to a variety of…
Net Worth- How Do You Calculate It? And is it Worth Tracking?
It’s common to hear about the net worth of billionaires and famous people. Forbes calculates a list of the richest people in the world every year. Take the top 5 in 2019’s list; Jeff Bezos– $113.0 billion Bill Gates– $107.1 billion Bernard Arnault– $106.6 billion Warren Buffet -$86.9 billion Mark Zuckerberg– $74.9 billion Those 5 people nearly have $500 billion…
Financial Advisers: Do you need one and how can they help you?
Do you need a financial adviser? Do you need a financial adviser? or to put it another way- can you get more value from a financial adviser than they charge? Every day the FIRE community is promoting the lowest cost index fund investment for a number of reasons. One of which is that you will avoid paying extra in fees-…
What is AfterPay? and should you use it?
If you’ve been shopping online recently you may have noticed something different when you go to pay. 6 new words below the buy now button. “or 4 easy payments with afterpay”. What do these six words mean, and should you use them? I’m not sure how long afterpay has been around. And I didn’t know much about it. To be…
How Long Does It Take To Switch Your kiwisaver
Now some of you might already know that I decided, back in August, that it was time to move my KiwiSaver fund away from the big bank and high fees and switch to a low fee provider. I decided this after looking into a few low fee KiwiSaver providers and decided Superlife was for me. I like to be hands-on…
The Cost Of Housing: to Rent, or to Buy- Regional Data
One of the cornerstones of managing money is to focus on the big three. The three areas in your life that you spend the most money on. They are housing, transport, and food. If you optimise these three aspects you of your life, you can really speed up your journey towards financial independence. Note I deliberately didn’t say you need…
How To Save Money on Your Car Insurance in NZ
The team at Cove has offered to pay for the first month of your car insurance if you decide to switch to them using this link. They’ll cover the first month (Up to $100), and they’ll even offer to help cancel your current car insurance policy. Why switch to Cove? I’ll tell you below. I had to renew my car insurance…
The Value of Education- Net Worth and Income Statistics
Whether or not you should go to university is a big question to ask of someone when they are 17 or 18 years of age. And I don’t think anyone can answer this question for you. It’s a personal decision. In recent years, the problem is that the price of university or higher education has been increasing year on year-…
What are you Actually Investing in? Vanguard, NZX50, and S&P500
The talk around the personal finance water-cooler is that you should invest in low-cost index funds, such as the NZX50, S&P500, and the Vanguard fund offered by InvestNow. But how many people who are invested in these funds actually know what companies they are investing in? Either directly, or indirectly? In reality, when I invested in them really only knew…
Investing Won’t Make You Rich
Today, I’m going to share a truth about investing that some people might not like. One that might not be as obvious to people in recent years. Especially with the rapid rise value in Bitcoin, and weed stocks, and the bull market in tech stocks. There have been a lot of stories around of investment doing very well in recent…
Lessons Learned After One Year of Investing
Since early 2018 I’ve been drip-feeding money into InvestNow. I’ve scheduled an automatic payment the day after I get paid so I don’t get tempted to spend it. I thought it might be interesting for you to see how my investments are going, and to share with you some lessons I have learnt along the way. In the Begining with…
Debt Elimination Plan: Snowball or Avalanche
If you don’t have debt, you need to recognize that you one of the fortunate few. Our whole society relies on fast credit and “buy now, pay later” loans to operate. It seems normal for everyone to be in some sort of debt. And once people stop taking on debt, often economies can be plunged into recession due to less…
The Downsides of Kiwisaver- What You Need to Know
Are there any downsides to KiwiSaver? Don’t get me wrong- I do believe that KiwiSaver has its place, and if you are a salary earner you should be enrolled and contributing. It’ll be the best return on an investment you will ever get! I’ve already done a post about what I think is wrong with Kiwisaver. That points out the…
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