Ten Years Later: What KiwiSaver Taught Me
07 Jun, 2026
Ten years ago, on the 6th of June 2016, I published my very first blog post. It was about KiwiSaver.
I cannot believe that The Happy Saver is ten years old! Happy Birthday to us!
In that first month, I also wrote about Gold, Credit Cards and Kids and Money. And it's fair to say my thoughts have changed somewhat. I’ve sold our gold, cancelled our credit card, and spent the last ten years ensuring our ‘kid’, who is now a young adult, knows all about how money works. And what of KiwiSaver? Well, paying attention to that has really paid off.
Ten years ago, I had absolutely no idea where that first blog post would lead. And I had no clue that a decade later I would be as fascinated by our personal finances and investing as I am today. So today, I wanted to go back to where it all started and talk about the evolution of our KiwiSaver investment.
At the time, I was simply excited about KiwiSaver. Many were still ho-hum about it (and, foolishly, some still are today), but having worked in the mines in Australia (as a dump truck operator, of all things) and paid into their superannuation scheme, I learned the size of older colleagues' balances and how significant investing for retirement can be. Here in Aotearoa, I wanted people to know about the government contribution that was due to be paid out that month (if they met their criteria) and to make sure they were claiming it. Like many of my early articles, it was practical and straightforward. And refreshingly short!
Back then, Jonny and I had a combined KiwiSaver balance of about $87,000. In my first blog post, I wrote that our family balance was approaching $100,000 (I think that figure also included our eight-year-old daughter’s KiwiSaver balance). I know that it felt like a huge milestone to reach that first $100,000.
In fact, I wrote: "Collectively, we are now getting close to $100K in KiwiSaver. Not bad for nine years of savings, right?"
We joined KiwiSaver soon after it started in 2007, and had spent nine years contributing and watching our balances grow. But those years were far from smooth; contributions were steady but variable in size. Our daughter was born in 2007, and I stepped away from paid work for many years. Both Jonny and I have only ever worked part-time since she was born, which has meant smaller contributions. We lived through the Christchurch earthquakes, a period of upheaval and uncertainty that affected our family for years. At times, neither of us worked (our choice), and eventually we moved to Central Otago to rebuild our lives and create a new home elsewhere, and both went back into part-time work. However, if we were not in paid work, we always made voluntary contributions to our funds.
I’m certain that our haphazard approach was not what the government intended.
But through all of those life changes, one thing remained constant: Whether employed or not, we kept investing.
Reaching $100,000 and documenting it in my very first blog post felt like a huge milestone because it was. What I didn't realise then was that it was only the beginning of our investing journey.
In the beginning, I thought KiwiSaver was all about free money
My early articles were full of reminders to check your employee contributions, to make sure you qualified for the member tax credit, and to take advantage of the available incentives.
Back then, KiwiSaver was far more generous than it is today. There was a $1,000 kick-start for all new members and a much higher government contribution. Over the years, those incentives have been steadily whittled down, and today the government contribution is just $260 a year, provided you contribute at least $1,042 yourself.
While I think that, for most, it's worth claiming every dollar you're entitled to (and those in PAYE will easily achieve that), the reality is that government incentives are no longer one of the main attractions of KiwiSaver. Going forward, you have both yourself and your employer to thank for your growing balance.
Over the years, our family has received thousands of dollars in government contributions and employer contributions. Those deposits into our funds really helped grow our balances.
But ten years of writing about KiwiSaver has taught me that the incentives are not the reason people become wealthy.
The habit of investing is.
The people who build wealth are usually the people who keep showing up to invest in a decent KiwiSaver fund each week, month, year, and decade. And let’s not forget showing up through fearful headlines, global pandemics and sharemarket crashes.
Then I discovered fees.
One of the first major changes we made was switching KiwiSaver providers because of fees.
Our first KiwiSaver provider was ANZ. Simply because we banked with them. Many people still do this, and I’d say to you, “Don’t. Shop around”. The vast majority of us had little clue what we were doing in the beginning and never paid attention to fees, mainly because we didn’t know we should - and the provider didn’t tell us what they were anyway. Then, in 2017, Sam Stubbs of Simplicity began calling out providers. He can take all the credit for exposing the high fees they were charging. After spending time researching fees, fund options and investment philosophies, we moved our KiwiSaver accounts to Simplicity. We started with their Growth fund, before moving to their High Growth fund when it was launched.
High-growth funds - and more exposure to global sharemarkets - have played a big part in the size of our balances today.
At the time, changing providers felt like a big decision, but it marked the beginning of my taking a much more active interest in how our money was invested. And I’ve never stopped paying attention since.
I started comparing providers and, by researching internationally, where fees were much more openly discussed, realised that seemingly tiny percentages could add up to tens of thousands of dollars less in my KiwiSaver fund over a lifetime. ANZ had been getting wealthy at my expense.
At the time, it felt like a huge discovery. And it was. Personally, I strongly believe that you shouldn’t be paying a fee above .50% for your KiwiSaver fund.
But what I didn't know then was that fees were only one piece of the puzzle. Over the following years, I would learn about growth funds, index investing, volatility and risk.
Over many years, New Zealand has been learning about KiwiSaver together.
Each blog post showed the progression of my knowledge over time, and I’ve noticed that as balances grow, others are taking more notice.
Then the sharemarket started teaching me lessons.
One of the most common themes throughout my KiwiSaver articles has been market downturns and sharemarket crashes. Time and again, I've found myself writing about falling balances, nervous investors and the importance of staying calm when markets become volatile.
In 2018, I wrote an article titled "Dropping markets - Should I panic?" My answer was simple: No. Do absolutely nothing. Stay invested, and keep investing.
At the time, that advice was largely theoretical, but then COVID arrived, and the world suddenly felt uncertain. Sharemarkets were falling rapidly, and readers of my blog were worried. Maybe this time was going to be different? Maybe panic was warranted?
At the time, I was hearing stories in the news about people watching their KiwiSaver balances drop and then switching to conservative funds in an attempt to stop the losses. I felt it was really important to encourage people not to do that, because locking in losses by selling during a market downturn can do far more damage than the downturn itself. Please don’t ever do that.
And I found myself writing another article: The share market is doing what it does, so JUST CHILL!
The interesting thing is that those articles were never really about KiwiSaver. Instead, they were about behaviour because I’d come to realise that investing success is often less about picking the perfect fund and more about avoiding poor decisions when emotions are running high.
Over the years, I have watched our KiwiSaver balances fall many times and tens of thousands of dollars disappear. I’ve then sat back and watched those losses recover.
The biggest lesson I learned, and shared, was that sharemarket declines are not something to fear; no, they are something to expect as a normal part of the process. In fact, over time, I have come to think of them as shares going on sale - a real buying opportunity. When we shop, we love buying things at a discount. Yet when the sharemarket falls, and investments become cheaper, many people panic, and I’m always explaining why they shouldn’t.
A market downturn doesn't mean the sale is permanent. It simply means that, for an unknown period, the price of owning great businesses has fallen. That shift in thinking helped me stop viewing market crashes as disasters and start seeing them as a normal part of long-term investing.
My thinking started to change.
When I first started writing about KiwiSaver, I thought of it primarily as a retirement savings account that I would access when I turned 65. When I wrote that first post, I still had 23 years till that birthday. Retirement felt so far away (it still does if I’m honest).
But over time, I began thinking about it differently. As I learned more from the global Financial Independence community about early retirement, I began to view KiwiSaver as part of a broader investment portfolio.
Meaning that we switched providers again, this time to InvestNow. We moved from more actively managed funds into completely passive funds and into the most aggressive fund we could find, one that didn’t pick companies, sectors or even countries; instead, it just bought everything the global sharemarkets had to offer - the Total World Fund.
And, having already tinkered with other investments outside of KiwiSaver, we became increasingly focused on other investment options as we realised the role they could play in wealth generation.
We swam against the tide, chose shares over an investment property, and became increasingly interested in financial independence.
At some point, I stopped asking "How can I build a bigger KiwiSaver balance?" and started asking "How can we build investments that give us more freedom and options?" The focus shifted from building a pot of money we couldn't access until age 65 to creating investments that could support us well before then.
That change in thinking led us to invest in the same type of fund, but outside of KiwiSaver, and focus on financial independence rather than a traditional retirement date.
Today, that approach has paid off. We reached Coast FI in our early 50s, knowing that our existing investments would continue to grow and pay us income when we retire early.
Watching Compounding Happen
One of the questions I often get asked is whether investing really works, and after nearly twenty years of investing in KiwiSaver, I can confidently say yes. And the beauty of creating our own blog is that I’ve effectively documented our progress over the last decade.
But it doesn't always feel like it's working; you have to zoom out to see the progress.
Looking back through our records, here are the combined KiwiSaver balances for Jonny and I over the past ten years:
Combined KiwiSaver balances for Jonny and I over the past ten years.
What I like about this table is that it shows the years when our balance grew steadily, the years when growth felt slow, and the years when our balance went backwards.
At the time, that drop in balance felt uncomfortable, but we invested throughout that period regardless (buying the same shares, but more cheaply), and looking back now, it barely registers. What mattered was the long-term overall trend, and that was up.
A key part of this growth is that as soon as we learned that moving into a high-growth fund would mean more money in retirement, we moved. Our balance feels every nuance of the sharemarket, but a low-fee, high-growth investment creates more wealth over time.
It took us nine years to build our first $87,000, and the next ten years added another $228,000, bringing us to $315,000 today.
Not because we suddenly became brilliant investors or started tipping in more money, but because compounding had more money to work with.
In the beginning, progress feels painfully slow, and then, one day, you look back and realise that momentum is building much more rapidly.
What happened next?
Today, Jonny and I have a combined KiwiSaver balance of approximately $315,000.
Our daughter, who was enrolled in KiwiSaver as a baby and is now 18, has grown her balance to around $30,000. The majority of her growth is coming from compounding.
Together, that's about $345,000 invested through KiwiSaver.
What's particularly interesting to me is that my own KiwiSaver balance is now around $172,000 compared to Jonny's $143,000. Given that women often end up with lower KiwiSaver balances than men due to lower lifetime earnings, career breaks and caregiving responsibilities, I'm especially pleased to have bucked that trend.
And it wasn't by chance. I saw the writing on the wall when I had my daughter and stopped working. My higher balance was the result of two things: bringing my small Australian superannuation balance over to New Zealand and rolling it into my KiwiSaver, and making deliberate voluntary monthly contributions from our family's income to my KiwiSaver over many years when I was not working.
Small amounts invested consistently in a high-growth fund and left alone for a very long time have had nearly two decades to compound, and they have another decade to go. KiwiSaver is a reminder that investing rewards patience.
KiwiSaver is now part of a bigger plan.
But perhaps the biggest change is that KiwiSaver is no longer our entire investment story. While it used to make up the bulk of our investments, it no longer does.
Today, our total investment portfolio is nearing $800,000, with KiwiSaver accounting for $315,000 of that amount. While our KiwiSavers are in an InvestNow KiwiSaver Foundation Series Total World Fund, the remainder is invested in a Smart Total World Fund outside KiwiSaver, and this is where our focus now lies. Also, fun fact: this month Smart is celebrating 30 years since launching New Zealand’s first ETF, the Smart NZ Top 10 ETF.
Over the past 18 months, I haven't contributed to my own KiwiSaver. As a self-employed person, I've chosen to direct new money into investments outside KiwiSaver, where I have greater flexibility and access to my money. While Jonny remains employed, he will contribute to his KiwiSaver; when he stops, his contributions will cease.
But here's the important part: While I don’t contribute to my KiwiSaver, it grows under its own steam now. And I never stopped investing elsewhere.
Jonny and I have both taken mini-retirements over the years. There have been multiple times when employment income stopped. Yet whenever contributions from work stopped, we made sure to budget so we could continue investing regardless.
Our habit of investing is so ingrained now that we might have changed KiwiSaver provider and account type, slowed, and, in my case, ceased KiwiSaver contributions, but I never stopped investing somewhere. Until recently, that is, when we hit Coast FI, and technically, we can now stop. Stopping investing is so hard! It’s hard to break such a good habit!
What surprised me most
If I could go back and talk to the Ruth who, with Jonny's encouragement, wrote that first blog post in 2016, I think the thing that would surprise her most is how ordinary the journey turned out to be.
There were no breakthrough moments, winning stock picks or dramatic financial transformations. There were just years of investing and waiting. Some years we contributed more, some less. Some years we were employed, other years we weren't. I looked back and worked out that we only ever contributed up to $4,000 a year to our KiwiSavers, combined. The rest came from employer and government contributions, and sharemarket gains.
There were earthquakes, house rebuilds, career changes, mini-retirements, a global pandemic, and countless market downturns, along with one or two sharemarket crashes along the way. And there was also a heck of a lot of growth in the sharemarket.
Life was never perfectly linear, so neither were our KiwiSaver balances.
But the habit of investing endured, and when I look back at my own spreadsheets, that's what is building our wealth. We never missed a month or an opportunity to invest. And while we might have changed providers, fund type and lowered our fees - all important factors for sure - it was the decision to keep investing, regardless of what was happening around us, that means we far exceed the average KiwiSaver balance for people our age:
| Age | Female | Male | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18–25 | $10,035 | $12,116 |
My daughter’s current balance:
$30,000
|
| 51–55 | $58,221 | $77,614 |
My current balance:
$172,000
Jonny’s current balance:
$143,000
|
Source: RNZ - The average KiwiSaver balance for your age
The things that changed
Over the years, governments have changed the KiwiSaver rules. And I’m pretty confident that they are not done yet.
All three of us received the $1,000 kick-start when we joined KiwiSaver. That has since been scrapped.
The government contribution was reduced from $1,042 to $521 and is now just $260. I suspect that will go at some point, too.
Contribution rates increased, meaning both your employer and you will invest more.
But there is one KiwiSaver change that I continue to think about - not for myself, but for our daughter.
Somewhere along the way, KiwiSaver became closely associated with buying a first home. Many people now see it primarily as a house deposit scheme, forgetting that its original purpose was to help bridge the gap between NZ Super and the amount people will actually need to live on in retirement.
International friends are often surprised to learn that New Zealanders can withdraw most of their retirement savings to purchase a first home. I've become increasingly concerned about people (particularly women) withdrawing their KiwiSaver balance, resetting it to almost zero, and then finding themselves with a mortgage to service and little capacity to rebuild their retirement savings.
Over the years, this has strengthened my belief that KiwiSaver and a first-home deposit should be treated as two separate goals, and that's why we've always encouraged our daughter to invest both inside and outside KiwiSaver. Just as we are doing.
Her KiwiSaver is in a High Growth fund and is for her future retirement.
Her investments outside KiwiSaver are for the opportunities that may arise before then, whether that's buying a home, starting a business, travelling, studying, or something else entirely.
The key was starting early. If she decides to buy a home one day, she'll have investments available to help achieve that goal. And if she decides home ownership isn't for her, she'll still have a growing investment portfolio helping to fund whatever life she chooses.
To me, that's one of the greatest gifts investing can provide: choice.
KiwiSaver providers came along thick and fast over the years. There are now 31 licensed KiwiSaver providers offering a staggering array of 400+ funds.
Those funds evolve, changing, merging, and reimagining as they jostle for your KiwiSaver dollar. For me, sorting out the ones worth investigating became easier and easier over the years, thanks to the likes of JL Collins, Alan and Katie Donegan, The Barefoot Investor, and, I’d like to think, my own common sense. All prompt you to look for a low-fee (less than 0.50%) passively managed (buys the entire global economy) KiwiSaver Fund.
While sharemarkets fell on occasion, sometimes dramatically, overall they rose, pulling my investment balance up with them.
Source: Google - Vanguard Total World Stock Index Fund ETF
Watching this ebb and flow during global upheaval, tracking our KiwiSaver balances, and just taking a general interest in our money meant that my knowledge changed too, and I became more confident investing and more convinced than ever that long-term investing works.
The things that never changed
If I had to boil down everything I have learnt from nearly two decades of KiwiSaver and ten years of blogging, it would be this:
Start investing in your KiwiSaver. Stop talking about it, and start doing it.
Keep contributing. Market low? Invest. Market high? Invest. Market meh? Invest.
Find a low-free high-growth fund and settle in for decades.
Pay attention, but not too much. Track your balance monthly.
Stay invested throughout ups and downs.
Keep learning. Talk to others about money.
Give your money time.
That's it.
No secret formula or sharemarket predictions from some random person on the internet. No clever tricks - Just hundreds of small investments over many years.
What would I do differently?
KiwiSaver has evolved a lot, and even if, back when I started, I had all the information I have today, I wouldn’t have been able to implement it. There just wasn’t the range of funds there is now, or the tools to help you choose. But let’s pretend for a moment. If I had my time again, I would have:
Moved to a high-growth fund sooner
Moved to a low-fee fund sooner
Moved to a passively managed fund that buys the whole world sooner
Next steps
While I have stopped contributing to my KiwiSaver, and Jonny will eventually stop contributing when he finishes paid work, we'll continue to let compounding do its thing and keep tracking our balances each month. When our 65th birthdays roll around in 2037 and 2038, we'll have the pleasure of finally cracking open the nest egg we've spent decades building. Together with NZ Super and income from our other investments, it will help fund a retirement we've been intentionally planning for many years.
And while I'm content with what we're built financially, that's not what makes me happiest.
What makes me happiest is the knowledge we've passed on - not only to you, my fellow Happy Savers, but also to our daughter.
Yes, we've been building wealth, but we've also been building her knowledge. For every 30, 40, 50, and 60-year-old who said to me, “Why did no one teach me this growing up?”, I’ve heard you, and I’ve passed my knowledge on. Please do the same.
One of the things I'm proudest of is that our daughter has already reached adulthood and understands enough about investing, compounding, and financial management to get by. She knows that wealth isn't created overnight. It's built through patience, consistency and good decisions repeated over time.
To me, that's every bit as valuable as the money itself.
A final thought and thank you
When I wrote my first blog post ten years ago, I thought I was writing about KiwiSaver, but what I was really writing about was the importance of investing consistently. I made the best decisions I could with the knowledge that I had at the time, and while I might have tweaked and refined my KiwiSaver provider and fund over the years, I never missed a single opportunity to invest.
One monthly investment at a time.
The same consistency that built our KiwiSaver balances is the consistency that built this blog. I started by sharing what I was learning and began documenting our journey. Over the years, through my podcast, I added what you were learning, and together we’ve managed to grow New Zealand's longest-running personal finance blog. Who would have thought!
Ten years later, I'm incredibly grateful that I started both. Thank you so much for being part of it. I’ve met so many fabulous people through The Happy Saver, and I’m genuinely excited about the friends I’ve yet to meet.
