Protect Your Wealth Creating wealth takes time, effort and discipline, and also a willingness to defer spending and take calculated risks. It is not always a straight line process. In fact, it can be a bit like playing monopoly. Every now and then you draw a bad card that costs you a lot of money or sends you straight to jail! Wealth protection is just as important as wealth creation, yet it is often overlooked. Keeping ...

Give and Get Back It is tax refund time and if you have given funds to an approved charity or other donee organisation, you can bundle up your tax receipts and submit a claim for a tax rebate of one third of the amount donated. A list of approved donee organisations can be found on the IRD website. Many people are unaware that ‘voluntary’ school fees can be claimed as a donation as long as you have a receipt with the ...

What Investment Income Really Means When it comes to managing investments, a big source of confusion is the relationship between income, return, cash flow and capital. These four things come together make investments grow and to provide funds for the enjoyment of life. Different approaches are needed depending on what your financial goals are. When people say they want a good income from their investments, what they usua...

Getting Ahead in Your Thirties and Forties Mid-life is a critical time for making the right financial decisions. It is a time when there are many demands and considerations to be juggled; partners and children, parents, career, personal goals, current lifestyle and future lifestyle. It can be a crazy time and it seems like there is never enough money to go around. The way to deal with the craziness is to work on some fund...

A Business or a Job? Owning a business is often touted as a great way to increase wealth. Wealth coaches urge employees to give their jobs and start a business to get themselves on the path to riches. So, is owning a business the path to riches? It depends. There are several ways to get into business and they each have potentially different outcomes. If you have a great idea and plenty of enthusiasm, you can start your o...

Understanding Market Volatility Volatility in the share market is both a threat and an opportunity. It is a threat for people who don’t understand it and an opportunity for those who do. It is something to be welcomed. Without volatility there would be no capital gain. There is a natural process at play in market cycles called ‘reversion to mean’. Simply put, this means that share prices follow a long term upward tr...

Your Financial Safety Net Life is not meant to be boring. It is for living to the full, making the most of opportunities and taking a few risks along the way. A financial safety net to protect you when things go wrong is a key part of creating and preserving wealth. The degree of risk you can take changes with age and accordingly the size of the safety net you need increases. Young people have little accumulated and not ...

Elder Abuse Our population is aging and incidents of elder abuse are increasing in line with this trend. Elder abuse is a serious issue in New Zealand, and Age Concern report that they receive around 2000 referrals a year, with the most common types being financial, physical and emotional. For every referral, there are, no doubt, many more cases which go unreported. Financial abuse of the elderly can take many forms. At ...

Fixed Interest Ladders for Peace of Mind Managing money to cover short term needs can be challenging. Money needs to be available at the right time while still earning a reasonable rate of interest and without taking too much risk. Added to these issues is the uncertainty of which way interest rates will go in future. A strategy called ‘laddering’ can be used to minimise the effect of interest rate uncertainty and ena...

Magnify Your Wealth One of the most powerful and fastest ways to build wealth is to use the principle of leverage. Leverage simply means to borrow money to invest in the expectation that the net returns from the investment will be greater than the interest payable on the loan. Leverage can be thought of as using other people’s money as well as you own to increase your investing power. A common way of using leverage is ...