The Financial Job I’ve Been Avoiding For Months
06 Sep, 2026
I’m pretty good at financial admin. Most of the time, I really look forward to it. I don’t want to wish my life away, but I genuinely get excited about the first of the month because that is when I check the value of each bank account, our ETF, and our KiwiSaver, and use that information to update our net worth spreadsheet. My spreadsheet is very basic, but perfectly good enough for me, and I’m pleased to report that our net worth is increasing.
Tracking my net worth, however, doesn’t tell me how our investments are actually performing. It’s all well and good investing in something, but if it’s not making any money, what’s the point? Which is why I’ve always used an online share portfolio tracker, a Kiwi company called Sharesight, to do all the maths I’ve got absolutely no interest (or ability) in doing myself. It tracks our ETF investments and tells me whether they are actually making us any money, or not.
But if there is one piece of financial admin that I procrastinate about, it’s Sharesight. While absolutely brilliant, in the same way you shouldn’t ask me how electricity works, don’t ask me exactly how Sharesight works either. If I feed it the correct information, it spits out the right information for me to assess our investment performance. That’s about as technical as I need to get.
Despite using it for many years, I don’t consider myself an expert user and, fortunately for me, it mostly runs itself. But I do understand that if I give it the wrong data, the results it gives me will also be wrong. And for months I’ve had this gnawing suspicion that I’d not been feeding it entirely accurate information. Which meant I didn’t entirely trust the investment returns it was showing me.
And did I immediately investigate and fix this potential problem? Nope. I thought about it instead. For months. Every now and then I’d log into Sharesight, look at the numbers and think, I really must check whether all of this is correct. Then I’d close it again. The problem wasn’t really Sharesight. Thinking about Sharesight was the problem.
The longer I left it, the more complicated I imagined the job would be. I was certain I’d failed to enter something along the way, and because Sharesight can do a whole lot more than what I currently use it for, I had convinced myself that fixing whatever I’d mucked up would require a very clear head, a strong cup of coffee and a decent chunk of my day.
Finally, this week, I decided enough was enough. I brewed a coffee, set a timer for one hour and promised myself that no text, email, phone call, dog needing a walk, urgent thing I just had to tell Jonny, cat wanting in the door, or interruption of any kind was going to stop me from completing a task I really didn’t want to do.
I logged in and began cross-referencing the data in Sharesight with the actual balance and number of units we hold in the Smart Total World Fund ETF. I was expecting them to be different, purely because of user error on my part. But I really should have backed myself more because, to my complete surprise, they were SPOT ON. Honestly. All that mental energy wasted worrying about nothing.
Let me explain what I thought I’d mucked up. I buy the Smart Total World Fund ETF in two ways. Firstly, I buy the majority directly from Smart (but have eased back since reaching CoastFI). When they email me my Securities Transaction Statement each month, I forward that email directly to Sharesight, which automatically adds the new purchase to my portfolio. It’s a great system, but all it takes to muck it up is me forgetting to forward an email. And for months I’d suspected I’d probably done exactly that a few times. Turns out I hadn’t.
Secondly, I have an affiliate with Sharesies, meaning that if someone uses my $10 referral code, I get money deposited into my Sharesies account, which I then use to buy more Smart Total World Fund ETF units. Sharesies links directly with Sharesight, so any buy or sell is automatically added without me having to do a thing.
The distributions (dividends) I receive in June and December are auto-imported too. Everything was there. There was nothing to fix. And I hadn’t even finished my coffee.
The reason I’m sharing this with you today has very little to do with Sharesight. It’s because I meet a lot of people who won’t look their money in the eye because they feel like it’s going to be a giant mess and far too much effort to sort out. They don’t want to look too hard at their credit card bill. They don’t want to find out what their KiwiSaver is invested in. They don’t want to work out what they actually spend each month, check what fees they’re paying, open their student loan email, cancel the subscriptions, consolidate the bank accounts, or investigate the investment they bought years ago and no longer really understand.
So they don’t. Instead, they think about doing it. And the longer they leave it, the bigger the job becomes in their head. Take it from me: the toad gets slimier the longer you stare at it.
Sometimes you just need to lick the slimy toad. It means doing the unpleasant, awkward or annoying thing you’ve been putting off. Stop thinking about it, get it done, and enjoy the relief of having it behind you.
Now, I’m not suggesting that if you finally take a good hard look at your finances you’ll discover, as I did, that everything is tickety-boo. You might actually find a mess that needs sorting out. But at least then you know what the mess is. And equally, I’ve met plenty of people who finally add everything up and discover that their financial position is far stronger than they ever imagined. You can spend an enormous amount of mental energy worrying about a problem you haven’t actually defined.
I also like that this happened to me because I’m generally confident with money. I’ve been tracking our net worth for more than a decade. I enjoy financial admin. I write and talk about financial independence all the time. And I still managed to turn one little piece of financial admin into a slimy toad I didn’t want to lick. Being financially confident doesn’t mean you always know what you’re doing, or that you never procrastinate. Sometimes it just means recognising when you’re procrastinating and finally doing something about it.
The upside to finally checking my Sharesight account meant that now that I knew the information going in was correct, I could trust the information coming out, which meant I could confidently use what it was telling me.
Any reader of The Happy Saver will know by now that I don’t mind paying for good technology that saves me time. I love PocketSmith because it automatically organises my financial data for me. I then use that information to budget, plan ahead and enjoy spending our money. Sharesight does something similar, but specifically for our investments.
I’m primarily interested in tracking our Smart Total World Fund ETF and comparing its performance with the fund we used to invest in, the Smart US 500 ETF. Sharesight brings together all the buys, sells and distributions (dividends) from the ETF units I’ve bought directly through Smart and those bought through Sharesies. It knows when I bought each unit, what I paid, the costs associated with buying it, the distributions I’ve received and what our entire holding is currently worth. And it can then compare our investment performance with a benchmark such as the S&P 500. It is GENIUS software.
So, now that I know the underlying data is accurate, I can confidently see the return we’ve actually earned:
Sharesight shows me the return we’ve actually earned with the Smart Total World ETF.
If I’m curious about how much income we’ve received from distributions, I can see that too. Remember that I don’t invest in this fund for the income from dividends (that is a small bonus), I do it for the capital gains over time:
Dividend insights and distributions for the Smart Total World ETF.
I can look back through the price history. For example, a Smart Total World Fund ETF unit that cost $4 a year ago might be worth $5 today, an increase (or capital gain) of $1. Sharesight knows the price of every unit I have purchased and can give me an average or accurate data on its value today. Below it is showing my average buy price.
Price comparison showing the current price and my average buy price.
So there are two things I’d like you to take away from my wee bout of procrastination. Firstly, think about the financial job you’ve been avoiding. Maybe there really is a problem waiting for you. Maybe there isn’t. But you won’t know until you look, and carrying around a vague feeling of dread is far more exhausting than knowing exactly what you’re dealing with. Set a date. Set a timer. Turn off the distractions. Give it an hour.
Secondly, some software is worth taking the time to learn how to use, and worth paying for, particularly when it takes complicated information and turns it into something you can actually understand and use. In fact, Sharesight is free if you have fewer than 10 holdings, which will cover most people pursuing financial independence.
As for me, the financial job I’d been avoiding for months took less time than it did to drink a cup of coffee. The toad was nowhere near as slimy as I’d made it out to be.
So, what financial job have you been avoiding?
Go lick the toad 😉
