All in Investment
Christmas at my house when I was growing up was always a busy, crowded and fun time. We used to receive heaps of Christmas cards and the most exciting ones were the cards that contained the “annual Christmas letter” from the sender. So, I thought I would write you a Christmas Newsletter from my whanau, with a personal finance twist of course…
Way back in February 2019 I created an account with Hatch, they were a very new startup at that time and many people had sent me emails asking me to look into them. They have created a simple and intuitive platform that has cut out a lot of the jargon and brokerage fees and made it pretty straight forward for you and I to invest in the biggest companies in the world.
My copy of Tales from a Financial Hot Mess has ended up a right hot mess. I read it in fits and starts over a month and each time something took my interest I placed a sticky note to mark the page and as it turned out, quite a bit took my interest.
From time to time I get emails along the lines of: Oh crikey, I think I should sell! Due to the ease with which we can now invest there are many people who are investing for the first time in their lives. They are learning how to buy, what to buy, what they like, what they don’t like. It used to be hard to invest, but that’s all changed now with the likes of SHARESIES and HATCH, the signup process is so rapid that you are signed up and have started investing before you can really comprehend what you are doing.
I’ve had my millionaire questionnaire available since July and I thought I’d look at a couple of the questions in particular and see if there are any common threads that we can draw on and I’ve read through each response and gleaned the following advice for you.
Have you noticed that I never really talk much about real estate? Except to say that I own the house I live in and I have never really gone too far down the path of writing about property as an investment. With the equity that we have in our house, the ‘obvious’ thing to many Kiwis would be to borrow against it and buy more property that I then rent out to other people. For many this has been a way to successfully grow their wealth. To many, it has not.
Lynn has been thinking many years ahead to her retirement and was wanting to know how to start to sell down her SuperLife funds. It’s a good question to ask because there is always a lot of content on a website about how and what to purchase, but finding how to divest yourself of your funds over time is a little harder to come by.
When I receive questions from time to time asking about student loans and whether I think it’s worth taking one on to invest the loan amount and make money out of taking on debt, you better believe, I’m interested in finding out more!
I might be unusual in the fact that I couldn’t wait for this book to arrive. Who else do you know that is excited about reading a book that would fall into the ‘personal finance’ section of the bookstore? But this book had been touted as a best seller, before it even went on sale, offering an inside view into the way “ordinary people built extraordinary wealth” and how I could do it too. And I wanted to know how to do that!
