My review of Kiwisaver has prompted me to seek out the most cost-efficient group of funds on the market – namely, Simplicity Kiwisaver. While the rates of return on Simplicity funds are lower than the previous bank-based fund I was with, the fees are significantly lower, particularly as the fund grows in size.
Author: Richard Christie
Richard Christie runs a small motel on the Kapiti Coast and also writes the Balance Transfers blog. He is interested in how businesses can play a role in improving environmental outcomes, and the challenges associated with doing so. Although this is a blog nominally about the topic of inflation, one of the key recurring questions this blog covers is 'what will be the financial cost and financial impact of climate change?' The blog covers micro economic and business-specific topics relating to the business landscape in New Zealand.
Price elasticity of demand, inflation, and the business confidence crisis
I’ve been down at the local cafe since it opened this morning trying to figure out a way that I’m going to run this motel over the next six months.
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Managing Overdues
I have something of a tragic history with libraries, having once run up a debt of over $100 on overdue fees during a history project. I was reminded of this incident when a recent trip to the library cost me $11.20 in overdue fees.
Otaki Motel has consumed one colour ink cartridge in 12 months
I’m very pleased to report that we have not had to change colour cartridges in over a year. This is a result of some sound planning that I undertook regarding printer cartridge consumption in September last year.
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Why I’m not in favour of a ban on plastic bags
I generally write these blog articles and schedule them well in advance. Experience has taught me this is a necessary activity – I aim to publish one of these things per week and having a few articles already scheduled helps to avert deadline pressure, which I experienced in spades when I wrote my student humour column during my last year of university.
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Kiwisaver and civic responsibility
One reason I am beginning to obsess over Kiwisaver is that I have begun to think forward to what may be the most important civic responsibility that I have to New Zealand in the future.
How food co-ops are changing habits around plastic bag use
Given the ‘plastic bag revolution’, one interesting side effect that I’ve noticed around belonging to an organic food co-op is that the process of belonging to the co-op seems automatically to reduce the quantity of plastic bags that I and other co-op members consume on a weekly basis.
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One indirect way we can cut down on plastic bags
I was watching Seven Sharp the other night and Jeremy Wells and Hilary Barry were weighing up the relative inefficiency of reusable bags. This is well trodden ground in terms of environmental irony – the idea that one would have to use a reusable 170 times in order to make an actual reduction in one’s impact.
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Thinking through the impact of Kiwisaver fees
My new habit of contributing $2 of my own cash to Kiwisaver per week has opened my eyes to the long term cost of tolerating Kiwisaver fees.
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Why I’m putting $2 per week into Kiwisaver
The problem is, at the moment I just don’t seem to give a damn about my Kiwisaver account. The fund is with a bank that is charging a regular fee, which I know is bad for my long term savings. The investment allocation is an asset type I chose a long time ago, and have never since reviewed, but I’m not in the least bit curious about what it’s invested in. There’s a bunch of money in another super account that I need to bring over from Australia, but I can never get around to it, and haven’t bothered even to calculate my potential savings from switching everything over.
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