Welcome to Passive Income NZ, my Journey to Financial Independence. Every month I share how I am tracking towards financial freedom by providing you with an update of where my portfolio is at and how far I am from financial freedom, and how my spending is tracking. My definition of financial freedom is not really the same as everyone definition. It’s not to just stop working, it is much more than that. It’s about living a more intentional life.
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So, I’ve updated my website theme! The company who developed my old website theme is no longer in existence, so there was no more support or updates. Therefore I decided it was about time to update the theme- hopefully the new theme is cleaner and a bit faster to load.
I’m still in the process of updating everything- so if you see something funny just bear with me as I modify the new theme. So far- I quite like it. I decided to try and find a theme that already has some of the features that you have asked for, like previous and next post links and a scroll to top button. Previously, I had coded these into the theme, which made it a bit clunky.
Recession fear has been on the rise recently. I decided to have a look at previous recessions that have happened in New Zealand history to get some perspective. I didn’t know much about them and it was an interesting learning exercise. Your Money Blueprint also has a recent post on recessions which you should check out.
Housing- yeap, more talk about how it’s expensive. I crunched some numbers and had a look at the median house price and rental costs throughout different regions in New Zealand– and it turns out that renting may be better than owning- at least according to my logic. The one factor that I didn’t really consider was the capital gains from owning a home. I’ll keep looking for some regional data on that one.
The Happy Saver also had a post about housing- well- more about the downsides of owning an investment property. The points made in this post solidifies my believes that investment properties are more work than they are worth. I’ll stick to index funds for the time being.
In other news- my TransferWise international debit card has arrived- ready for me to test on my upcoming trip to Australia. We’ll be using this card extensively when we go on our longer backpacking trip early next year- definitely beats paying the 2% conversion fee with the big Aussie banks.
Investments in September
September was a quiet month for spending. We didn’t spend a lot at all. We spend most of the month at work- so there wasn’t any time to spend. It did help our savings rate thought!
72% of Spending for August went into investing for our future. That is the amount of money invested or principal paid on the mortgage as a percentage of total money spent.
For the month of September, as a percentage of spending;
- Investment: 37% (+17%)
- Mortgage: 35% (+10%)
Portfolio August 2019
Asset allocation
- Australasian Shares: 28%
- International Shares: 28% +1%
- US shares: 4%
- Total Shares: 59%
- Kiwisaver: 12% (+1%)
- Peer to Peer Lending: 15% (-2%)
- Listed Property: 12%
- Bonds: 0%
- Cash: 2% (+2%)
Performance
The monthly performance has been tracking steadily. Remember- I’m not trying to gloat here- just showing my returns so that if you are not currently investing you can get an idea about what your returns could be- and hopefully you will get excited about investing like me.
- InvestNow: 16.25%
- Genesis Energy: 36.24%
- Kiwisaver: 6.32%
- Lending Crowd: 11.55% (-0.09%)
- Harmoney: 10.30% (-0.05%)
InvestNow: Returns from assets I hold are after fees and before tax for the last 12 months. Genesis Energy: Returns from capital gain and dividends in the last year. Calculated using Sharesight. Kiwisaver: Performance for the last year after fees and after-tax and membership fees. Lending Crowd: Net average return (NAR) is a calculated annualised return for your investment portfolio that’s calculated monthly on the 1st day of each month. Harmoney: Realised Annual Return (RAR) is a measure of the actual rate of return on funds invested in the Harmoney platform.
Goals
Road to 100K by December 2019
I’m not 90% there. But with only 2 months left, I’m even more certain that I’m not going to make it. I’m going to keep pushing on- might even try a few side-hustles selling seedlings and excess plants from the garden that we don’t want anymore.
Happy Investing Everyone.
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Thanks for the link to the Transferwise card. I signed up. It’s gonna be really useful in our next trip abroad.
Which funds are you in on Investnow?
Mainly the Vanguard, AMP capital NZ share and property funds. There are a few smaller legacy holdings in there like the US500- basically already exposed to that with the Vanguard fund. Considering a bond fund
Nice update. Love seeing other people having money in peer-to-peer lending / crowdfunding.
Peer to peer has been good to me so far the last 3 years- There just are not the many loans to fund anymore since they introduced institutional lenders onto one of the platforms. The other platform has too many lenders- so it’s hard to fund loans there too. So I’m slowly decreasing my peer to peer investing over time.