Back to Blog

The solar farm inside your KiwiSaver

Most people who ask me what their KiwiSaver fund actually owns are picturing shares and bonds. Companies they could look up on the stock exchange this afternoon and see a price for.A small number of KiwiSaver funds also hold something else. A stake in a company with no listed share price at all, because it has never been listed anywhere.What a private asset actually isThese are called private assets. In plain terms, a company that is not traded on a public exchange, and whose shares cannot be bo...

What Do You Actually Want?

Most people start a financial planning conversation with a number in mind. A retirement age. A target balance. An income they think they will need. These starting points are useful, but they are rarely the whole story.What you are usually working out, beneath the number, is whether you are free to live the life you want. Can you leave work you no longer enjoy? Can you stop when you choose to, rather than when you finally have no option? Can you spend on things that matter without a background se...

Deciding What We Can Live With

I was at an RIAA conference session on geopolitics and sovereign risk, listening to two fund managers explain how they navigate ethical investing when the world gets complicated. One story from that session is worth telling in full.John Berry runs Pathfinder, an ethical fund manager most New Zealand advisers know well. He told the room about the moment weapons exclusions in ethical investing stopped being straightforward.Excluding weapons manufacturers used to be simple. You could point to a com...

The Other Way To Give

By 9.45 on a U3A Cambridge morning, the doors have been open for fifteen minutes and the room is already more than half full. Not people sitting waiting for something to start, but people talking, laughing, catching up over coffee. The lecture does not begin until 10.30. They are there because they want to be, and they are happy about it. When the speaker finishes, they do not leave. They stay to talk to each other and to the person at the front, sometimes for a long time. We get thank you email...

Mining is needed, but it makes a mess

Mining is needed, but it makes a messI moderated a panel at the RIAA conference In Septemberå called "Can Mining Be A Responsible Investment?", and my co-panellist was Jessica Cairns from Alphinity Investment Management. We’ve worked with Alphinity for more than 5 years, so I already knew how carefully they think about this, but I still find mining one of the harder calls we make for clients.Someone on Alphinity’s sustainability committee has a line Jessica quoted on stage, and I haven’t ...

Seventy is the new Fifty

The clients we have worked with for twenty-five years or more are sometimes the most instructive. Many of them do not feel much different from when we first met them. They have left full-time work, but they have not left the picture. A number are consulting two or three days a week. Some moved into governance roles after finishing their main careers and have stayed there for a decade or more. We have clients in their seventies who have ridden the Tour Aotearoa more than once.This is not anecdote...

Why We Give The Way We Give

There was a story in the Cambridge News earlier this year about a local man with significant physical disabilities who gets around on a mobility scooter. His scooter has been breaking down. People in his community noticed, and someone started a fundraiser to get him a new one. That story stuck with us, not because it is unusual, but because it captures something that feels increasingly rare in the way we think about giving: someone saw a specific need, told the story honestly, and asked for help...

Reflections on Africa

Peter and I have just returned from five weeks in East Africa. Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zanzibar to finish, travelling with The Safari Company https://www.thesafaricompany.co.nz/.I want to get the plug out of the way early. If you are thinking about a trip like this, use them. Their knowledge of Africa, the countries, the people, the politics, was streets ahead of anything we could have organised ourselves, and it changed the trip completely.There were 16 other people in our group, a...

You Can't Eat Bricks

A client of ours described the moment clearly. She had reached her early sixties with an investment property, a bach, and a financial plan that had always assumed both would eventually look after things. Then she sat down and looked at what each one actually cost her every year. The numbers surprised her. Not in a catastrophic way. But enough to make her rethink.Property has an almost mythological status in New Zealand retirement thinking. If you own it, you feel covered. The asset is there, it ...

Good journalism did not disappear. It just moved.

I have been reading Heather Cox Richardson since 2017, when she started posting on Facebook. Back then she was a history professor at Boston College writing about American politics through the lens of American history. The posts were long, carefully argued, and entirely without hype. They were also, depending on your appetite for American political drama, either essential reading or something you had to pace yourself with.She moved to Substack in November 2019, and I have read her almost every d...

Managing geopolitical risk in your investments

The world has changed faster than most investment frameworks have caught up with. For most of our working lives, the rules were reasonably clear: the United States underwrote global security, developed countries were the safe end of any portfolio, and risk was something that happened in places further away. That picture is no longer accurate, and pretending otherwise is not a strategy.This article is not a forecast of what happens next. Nobody knows. But there are things we do know about how to ...

What people get wrong about "having enough"

One of the questions that comes up most often in our work, sometimes asked directly, more often circling around the edges of a conversation, is some version of: how do I know when I have enough?It sounds like a numbers question. It almost never is.We work with people who are, by any reasonable measure, in strong financial positions, and who still feel a low-level unease they can't quite name. We work with others who have considerably less and feel genuinely settled about where they are heading. ...

Words Matter More Than Ever

In law school, they taught us that words matter. Not just any words, the right words. The discipline of legal writing is built on that idea. Think about the last time you wrote to a company and actually got a useful response. It was probably not the longest letter you ever sent. It was the one where you stated clearly what had gone wrong, what you wanted done about it, and by when. The reader knew immediately what was being asked of them. That is not a lucky outcome. It is what happens when the ...

The “Tech Bros” Question

Over the past year I’ve heard a new phrase in client meetings.“Tech bros.”It’s usually said half-jokingly. But not entirely joking.Behind it sits something more serious. A discomfort about where power sits in the modern economy, and what happens when a handful of individuals control companies with products used by billions of people.This isn’t about disliking innovation. Most of the people I work with are deeply pro-innovation. They run hospitals, engineering firms, research teams. The...

Mindful Money Best Ethical Financial Adviser 2026

Carey Church has won the Mindful Money Best Ethical Financial Adviser award for 2026, and we are proud of that. This is work we care about deeply, and recognition from Mindful Money, whose whole purpose is to hold the industry to account on this, means something real to us.Until last year, the award was given to a business rather than an individual. When it changed to an individual award, Rodger Spiller and Carey were named co-winners, which was significant. Rodger has been working in responsibl...

What you need to understand about retirement villages before you get anywhere near one

Retirement villages are often sold as a simple solution. Downsize the house, free up some capital, hand over the maintenance, and move into a community where people look out for each other. For a lot of families, it gets presented as the obvious next step.I want to push back on the word obvious.Retirement villages are one of the most complex financial and lifestyle decisions people make later in life. They sit at the intersection of housing, care, ageing, family dynamics, and money. And in my ex...

Maybe this time it is different: what this means for your plan

Last month we wrote about what came through at the Portfolio Construction Forum.Jonathan Pain’s argument that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change what human capability looks like. And Oliver Hartwich’s description of the slow unravelling of the institutional order that investors have relied on, often without realising it, for the past thirty years.It felt different to the usual ‘this time is different’ commentary. We stand by that.But we also said the right response is not ...

New Zealand is finally getting a Modern Slavery Bill. Here is why you should care

Most people, when they hear the phrase modern slavery, picture something that happens somewhere else. In supply chains on the other side of the world. In countries with weak laws and weaker enforcement. Not here.That assumption is wrong.Modern slavery is not a historical term.It is a broad description for a range of practices where people are exploited, coerced, or controlled in ways that strip them of their freedom.Forced labour. Human trafficking. Debt bondage.Situations where someone is worki...

What does “US exposure” really mean in your portfolio?

Over the past year, more and more people have asked some version of the same question.“How exposed am I to the US?”It’s a fair question. The US dominates global sharemarkets, US politics fills the news, and many of the companies people recognise most are American. When markets feel uncertain, it’s natural to want to know whether too much of your money is tied to one country.But in practice, that question often mixes together two very different concerns. Untangling them makes the conversa...

Maybe this time is different - Part One

Most years since 2009, we have attended the Portfolio Construction Forum, a conference based in Sydney that we follow each year.It is one of the better investment conferences on the calendar. The quality of the speakers is consistently high, and the format forces you to think rather than just absorb a presentation.Over the years we have heard some very good calls, and some that turned out to be wrong. We have also heard the phrase ‘this time is different’ regularly, at conferences and in the...

What ethical investing can and cannot do

This is the final post in a three-part series on evolving ethical concern.It is important to be clear about limits. Ethical investing cannot fix global politics. It cannot force cooperation between nations. It cannot stop powerful people from behaving badly.What it can do is help you draw boundaries around what you are prepared to support with your money.That means deciding which kinds of behaviour you are willing to profit from, and which you are not. It means choosing not to fund the worst abu...

When the rules turn out not to mean very much

Over the last couple of years, we have been having a particular kind of conversation more often.A client will ask whether they own Palantir. Or Tesla. Or how much of their portfolio is sitting in Amazon. Sometimes it is about a specific company that has been in the news. More often it is a quieter question about what their money is actually doing while they get on with their lives.These are good questions. They are also harder to answer than people expect.In mid April the High Court delivered a ...

KiwiSaver 2040: Where the System Could Be Heading — and What That Means for You

Over the next 15 years, KiwiSaver is likely to become a far more significant pillar of New Zealand's retirement system. Several converging trends, demographic, political, economic and technological, will reshape how people contribute, invest and ultimately draw down their savings.The biggest change already signalled is the proposed gradual rise in default contribution rates, reaching 6% each for employees and employers by 2032. This shift could double the long-term balances of today's younger me...

Spending is changing. What does that mean for your investments?

Recently, I signed up to a spending monitoring and budgeting app for $120 a year. I did it partly out of curiosity, and partly because I wanted to test it properly before ever considering whether it might be useful for clients. What I did not expect was how quickly it pushed me into thinking more broadly about consumption, not just at a household level, but at an economy-wide level.At the same time, I have been reading more research from fund managers about how people are spending their money no...

When self-enrichment and corruption are openly defended

This is the second post in a series looking at how ethical concern is changing. The first explored why many people have broadened their focus beyond climate alone.Over the past year, a different discomfort has started surfacing more clearly in conversations. A sense that behaviour which used to be hidden or excused is now being openly defended.Under Donald Trump, and led by the US White House, the idea that it is acceptable to use political power to make yourself richer has been brought into the...