Money Talk column

The Investor 20 October 2012

Are bonds really that beautiful? Bonds are beautiful. That’s certainly the message when you look at a recent Reserve Bank list of returns on 11 different types of investments, including New Zealand, Australian and international shares, property, farms, bonds and cash.

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The Investor 6 October 2012

Rental property beats shares — or does it? At first it looked as if a recent article in the Reserve Bank Bulletin might help with the perennial question: Is it better to invest in property or shares? But no such luck!

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The Investor 22 September 2012

Help needed for retirees to live it up a bit. I’m disappointed. Retired people have been gaining access to their KiwiSaver money for several months now, but there’s no emergence of good new products to help them manage their savings.

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The Investor 8 September 2012

Risk is not a dirty word. A man on the radio the other day was talking about risk, and how we’ve become so scared about our children’s safety that we don’t let them climb trees. The kids lose out. It’s similar with investments. Many New Zealanders seem to be too scared of riskier investments, and they too lose from that fear.

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The Investor 25 August 2012

Retirement spending puzzle solved. It was a question that got people thinking. Massey University senior lecturer Claire Matthews had just finished a presentation at the Workplace Savings NZ conference on how much people spend in retirement. “How come most of the spending totals for two-person households are more than twice the one-person totals?,” somebody asked.

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The Investor 11 August 2012

Tax deductions: Not all they’re sometimes cracked up to be. A comment I overheard from a young man recently worried me. Talking about some kind of investment in race horses, and he said, “I put in $1000 a month. But I can deduct $800, so it’s hardly costing me anything.”

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The Investor 28 July 2012

KiwiSaver graduates face some choices. It’s decision time for the first KiwiSavers “graduates” — those over 65 who have been in the scheme for five years. But there’s no rush.

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The Investor 14 July 2012

More than one way to fill a financial gap. This is one of those columns — like the one in which I confessed that I don’t have a goal for my retirement savings — that might make the “conventional wisdom” people cross. But here goes: We don’t all need a sizable emergency fund sitting in a savings account.

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The Investor 30 June 2012

Angry readers react. I don’t think I’ve ever received as many letters about this column as I did after the last one about KiwiSaver. A man is cross with me, a woman is cross with the government, and others are confused, curious, or want to make a point.

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The Investor 16 June 2012

Many KiwiSavers contribute too much or too little. Some people are putting too much into KiwiSaver- arguably anyway. Meanwhile, others contribute nothing or too little to get the most out of the scheme, and would be rewarded for taking steps to change that in the next two weeks.

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