A fairer deal for all on real estate agent commissions. Now — with real estate agents hungry for listings — might be a good time for home sellers to negotiate a new way of paying agents. This is not about kicking a man when he’s down. What I’m proposing shouldn’t leave an honest agent worse off. In fact, if she or he is good at their job, it will leave them much better off.
Recession could be a blessing for most. The response to a question in a recent survey bothered me a little. Asked what they would do with a $10,000 cash windfall, 54.3 per cent of the respondents said they would pay off debt or save the money — down from 58.3 per cent three months earlier. It’s not exactly a huge drop. But I was hoping for a substantial increase.
How would you have done in financial knowledge survey? It’s question time. How would you have answered the following in a recent survey: “Which is generally considered to make you the most money over the next 15 to 20 years: a savings account, range of shares, range of fixed interest investments, or a cheque account?”
Time to top up KiwiSaver to make the most of the scheme. Mid-June is top up time for many people in KiwiSaver. If you don’t take action in the next week or two, you could miss out on up to a thousand dollars or so from the government.
Nyah nyah to Morningstar. One aspect of the recent Morningstar report on investors’ experience of managed funds — in which New Zealand came bottom out of 16 countries — got little coverage in the news media. Ironically, it’s about media coverage.
Ill wind not as bad as it seems. An email from a Christchurch reader has got me thinking. “In any game it is either a win, loss or a draw,” he writes. “Right now there are plenty of losers, nationally and globally — individuals, institutions, banks, organizations, even one or two countries. So who are the winners?”
Non-KiwiSavers miss out because of misinformation. Sometimes it’s not so much what you don’t know but what you misunderstand that hurts you. That came through loud and clear in my recent reader survey about KiwiSaver.
Sloppy thinking unfair to immigrants, 2-worker families. Every time the economy is looking iffy, people start saying, “Stop immigration,” or even, “Send home the immigrants.” Their reason: “They’re stealing our jobs.” This is sloppy economic thinking — not looking down the track at the consequences of a policy change.
You can indeed go wrong with bricks and mortar. I first heard people saying, “You can’t go wrong with bricks and mortar” years ago, when I lived in the US. I bet the saying isn’t quite as common there these days, now that millions of people have, indeed, lost huge amounts because of property. Yet we still hear that untrue “truism” in New Zealand. And in the last few weeks, as some people are trying to convince us that the house price slump is over, it keeps popping up.