All in KiwiSaver
Is it just me or are people confusing saving for a house with saving for retirement? I keep hearing about first home buyers all the time and how difficult it is to get into the market. But the question I keep asking myself is “why do people use their KiwiSaver as their primary mode of saving for a deposit?”
I’ve been having a good run with good returns but it is high time I diversified and headed offshore a bit more than what my KiwiSaver is offering. Diversification spreads risk so that when one investment is underperforming another is hopefully performing strongly.
It is important to track your net worth. How else can you know where you are financially so that you can plan for the future? The most important thing is to understand your financial position today so you can be moving in the right direction.
I have been hearing a lot for a long while about the fees that we pay to our KiwiSaver providers and that over the lifetime of the fund we are paying well above the odds for the service we get. Apparently we should be outraged. I have finally removed my head from the sand and took a closer look this week.
There is the general feeling that kids don’t learn about money at school, right? But, that is not the end of the world because we understand that as their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and friends we have the knowledge to teach them, yes?
A Bond is a loan you make to a government, state owned enterprise, council or company. Perhaps they have a specific project they are working on and they need to raise some cash to do it.
Does this sound too extreme to you? A nine year old with an investment portfolio so she can plan for something that may happen in her 20’s.
Having purposefully just returned from America on Monday two days BEFORE the American election I had an inkling that things might get a little crazy.
It has taken me quite some time to learn about diversification and the impact it can have on my investing. But it turns out that I was actually diversifying even when I still had debt.
