She's On The Money - MONEY DIARIES NZ: Learning Through Loss

Episode Date: March 3, 2024

This gorgeous community member from New Zealand lost her mum suddenly last year. While navigating her own grief, she's had to help her dad understand and manage his household finances,while planning her wedding and a six month OS honeymoon. The loss has highlighted how important it is to communicate openly about joint accounts, bill payments and creating a will for her and her fiance. She hopes our community can learn through her loss. Acknowledgement of Country By Natarsha Bamblett aka Queen Acknowledgements. The advice shared on She's On The Money is general in nature and does not consider your individual circumstances. She's On The Money exists purely for educational purposes and should not be relied upon to make an investment or financial decision. If you do choose to buy a financial product, read the PDS, TMD and obtain appropriate financial advice tailored towards your needs.  Victoria Devine and She's On The Money are authorised representatives of Money Sherpa PTY LTD ABN - 321649 27708,  AFSL - 451289.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, my name is Natasha Nabanunga-Bamblett. I'm a proud Yorta Yorta, Kernai, Wolperi and Awadjeri woman. And before we get started on She's on the Money podcast, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land of which this podcast is recorded on Awadjeri country, acknowledging the elders, the ancestors and the next generation coming through. As this podcast is about connecting, empowering, knowledge sharing and the storytelling of you to make a difference for today and lasting impact for tomorrow. Let's get into it. She's on the money.

She's on the money. Hello and welcome to She's on the Money, the podcast for millennials who want financial freedom. Welcome back to another one of our Money Diaries episodes where I get the absolute privilege of sitting down with one of our beautiful She's on the Money community members and talk to them all about their journey. Let's jump straight into it because this week I got a message and it sounded exactly like this. Kiora SOTM ladies, last year my mum died suddenly and it's been a massive shock to the system. I've had to help my dad understand and manage his household finances, navigate grief, plan a wedding and a six-month overseas honeymoon which was in the

pipeline before my mum died. It made my fiance and I realise how important it is to communicate openly about joint accounts and bill payments and we'll get cracking on a will. I'd love to share my story with the community if you'll have me. Of course, I'll have you money, Dyrus. Welcome to the show. Kia ora. Thanks for having me. Of course. Let's jump straight in. If I asked you to give your money habits a grade, what grade would you give them from A through to F? I think I'd probably grade myself between a B plus and an A minus. A B plus and an A minus. That's a pretty good position. Now, my favorite question,

tell me a little bit more about your money story. I guess my money story is pretty grounded in the kind of like money habits of my parents I grew up in a household where savings was really prioritized dad worked full-time and mom was a stay-at-home mom so their focus was really on like paying down the mortgage when I was young and I think while they were probably quite tight on money at some points we never went without as kids so yeah we always got to kind of do after-school activities etc etc yeah and mum really instilled the importance of being across your finances from quite a young age a queen yeah a real queen so she helped us set up bank accounts when we were quite young she made sure

we signed up to kiwi saver and she made us really like understand the importance of kiwi saver contributions, putting your KiwiSaver in a growth fund and just compound interest and term deposits and how you can make money off your money. Where did she learn all of this? You said she was a stay-at-home mom, like she sounds like she might have been an investment banker. She was just super organized. She was just like meticulous. She used to be an office manager before she was a stay-at-home mom. So she was just like very onto it. Yeah, that takes some serious level of organization to be an office manager. So she probably was definitely across everybody's business which I love. Tell me more what was growing up like? I guess because she was

so organized and onto it mum kind of ran like all of our household finances and my dad pretty much like wasn't really across any of it he was just really focused on making the money bringing it home mum will manage it. Yeah exactly mum will look after it and so he trusted her completely and I feel like it's often the other way around like I talk to friends who's like dad's handled all the finances but yeah in my family it was like my mum which was kind of great that she was across it all but when she passed away suddenly last year it meant that dad had a bit of a rude awakening he had access to some of their accounts or mum thought she'd set everything up in a joint account structure but after she died we realized that dad had access to about three of the like

10 accounts oh yeah okay and then that's a really big process of like applying for it to be released and like that's not what you need when you're buried in grief no it was quite a lot and I think like because the amount of money in those accounts was substantially less than the other accounts I mean like we were fine because dad was still earning but it just put like unnecessary pressure on him particularly around funeral expenses and everything else oh yeah and especially being really unexpected you don't get that grace period of going let's get our ducks in a row we know this you know awful thing is coming we can you know line everything up like when it's really sudden you go from being absolutely fine one day to being not around and you can't even ask questions like

oh hey mum is there anything like that we need to know like you just don't get that grace probably not a good practice to follow she was quite good in the sense that she had this little red book of passwords oh my gosh genius yeah don't recommend that I feel like that's the generation though I can almost guarantee my mum has one yes thank god for mums right with little password books you're like safety first yeah exactly so that was definitely quite helpful because it meant temporarily we could kind of see what was going on but then we went into probate so all those extra accounts that dad doesn't have it's all been locked up it's been a bit of a roller coaster of like dad having to learn how to internet bank and understanding how direct debits work and just like

he kind of knew roughly what was coming in and going out but he just felt like in the few months after mom died he'd been really like slammed with payments that he wasn't anticipating so like yeah funeral costs and everything else and then other big regular payments he didn't kind of know they were coming so yeah I think that's been like a massive learning curve for him but also like a big eye-opener for me as like yeah his daughter just I don't know I think it's so important that I don't know if you have a parent who doesn't know how to internet bank like make sure they know what they're doing it's so important not to have all the control with one party because you just don't know what life's going to throw at you. I feel like lots of people are in the opposite situation

as we were saying before to your parents where the dad runs the finances and this is going to sound really morbid but women on average live longer than men so if you've got like a mum or you are a female in a relationship and you just go no my husband sorts it out like it's absolutely fine like it's actually not because statistically at some point you're gonna have to manage the finances on your own. And that sounds again, morbid, but the reality of the situation is you're going to have to manage it on your own, regardless of gender. Your story literally is that where dad just trusted mom and that's great. And we want trust. We want inherent trust in a relationship, but it's not really about trust. It's actually about knowing the process. Like if

your dad had just known how to do it, he didn't have to do it. Mom was clearly across it, but like just knowing where the logins are how that works what that looks like oh here's how we pay bills nowadays like just being up with it would have given him such a sense of freedom during that time where he was probably feeling overwhelmed from every aspect in his life yeah oh for sure and it would have just been like I think one less burden yeah obviously on him and then I think also on like me and my siblings because now when he gets a bill and he like understandably he's getting a lot better but when it first started happening he'd get quite like flustered and stressed about the whole situation not really know how to manage it just even when it came to filling out like a

bank transfer and you have to put in like the reference and the code and all that kind of stuff he just didn't know what it meant yeah I just think it's so important and did your mom leave behind a will like was there a plan yes so I'm not super across this so much but I think she and dad made a will together and because they did it together I think I'd set it up in a way that everything passed to dad what I didn't realize was just even if you've set up a will and it's all straightforward the process around actually obtaining like the property and the money and the accounts is just so long like I'm not sure what it's like in Australia it's a very similar system which is very frustrating I was about to point that out I was like if you're

listening our money diarist is in New Zealand so there is a bit of a different process but they are very very similar. Yeah so I think it's just like for him learning how to kind of manage everything on a slightly reduced capacity. That's wild and in your money diary you wrote in now we're getting married which is very exciting and you're going to go on an overseas six month long honeymoon you lucky ducks how's all of that gonna happen tell me about that part of your money story yes so that's super exciting so we had kind of started thinking about this in like 2019 my partner and I were just so ready to get out of New Zealand like feel so far away from everything and we just wanted to explore the world and we knew we had a bit of saving to do before we could

do that but then COVID hit and everything you know got put on ice but we kind of kept saving quite diligently through that time so we managed to accrue quite a decent savings plan yeah so we had a bit of a goal in mind of how much we wanted to save and we reached that point over would that be like nearly five years to get there gosh you have to tell us like this is an anonymous money diary you can't be like yeah we had a savings goal no no how much have you budgeted for a six month overseas honeymoon? Like what does that cost? Yeah. So I did a lot of research into how much other people would say, but a lot of it was like American. So I didn't really know. So yeah, it's a bit frustrating, but we have budgeted 60,000 New Zealand dollars. Hey, that's pretty

good for six months, like $10,000 a month. All right. Yeah. Fingers crossed that will get us a wee way I think Europe's become a lot more expensive since 2019 so yeah yeah it definitely has is there something where you're kind of going over and yellowing it I have a sneaky suspicion that you just come across as a planner I think you might have a very attractive spreadsheet tell me about how you've managed this yeah so we kind of tried to figure out like okay well where realistically do we want to go we knew we always wanted to go to Europe we wanted to be a little bit more intrepid when we first started planning in 2019 before the pandemic and we were looking into like slightly more remote places or like around like the stands but we decided like I'm

just like a little bit of a anxious person so I didn't want to girlfriend yeah go without a plan and also like go somewhere maybe like if another pandemic broke out it would be a little bit more difficult to get home so we have kind of stuck to the beaten track a little bit more yeah so we'll be going through a little bit of central Europe and then mainly trying to hang out around the Balkans. So yeah. Cool. I love this. All right. Wedding. How much is that going to cost? What's the plan? Tell me all of the stories. Sorry, we need the pervy details. No, that's all good. So we planned the trip before we thought about getting married and then we thought, okay, well, we're going on this epic trip. Like, why don't we just get married before we go and we can treat it

like a bit of a honeymoon because who wants to go straight to work when they're married? Well, that was my opinion anyway. No, no, no. As someone who got married and then went back to work for two weeks before going on a honeymoon, because I just had too much to do. I was like, I've just got stuff to plan, stuff to get done. Yeah. I didn't want to go back to work. I wanted to be in my love bubble. So yeah, good idea. Yeah. I appreciate it. It's a very privileged position to be able to just like say, oh, well, you know, we're going to up and leave. I know not everyone can do that. With this amount of planning you can, like, I'm sorry, you've been planning it since 2019 like yes acknowledging privilege around money is very important but I also think

being like oh it's really lucky that we can it's like no you also worked really hard so you could do this yeah it should be really exciting yeah so on the wedding we quickly realized that a lot of venues have like a minimum spend so if we wanted to use a particular venue we were going to have to have quite a significant number of people in order to meet the minimum spend and so we found ourselves kind of going down this road we were like okay well we have to meet minimum spend so we have to have like you know 75 plus people when we'd kind of started the process thinking actually we want to do something really small because we wanted the focus to be the honeymoon so yeah when we realized how much that was going to cost we ended up pulling right back

and we're now only going to have about 30 people oh that's so sweet yeah so it'll be really intimate so we've budgeted about 30 grand hopefully it will be a little bit less than that we're just kind of like trying to be a little bit conservative around estimates so we're not like yeah hit with any kind of bill right before we go overseas and what kind of wedding are you planning now like obviously New Zealand venues are very expensive because they're very beautiful at the same time but like what kind of venue are you now looking at and like where will you get married yeah so we live in one of the bigger cities in New Zealand so we're probably not going to do something outdoors we've found this little event space that's relatively urban that's kind of like

lofty cool vibey yeah so it'll be quite cute and that was a lot more affordable than going to like a vineyard or something like that which would have been like absolutely stunning and I've had friends do that and it's always been epic but we just knew that for us we wanted to get married in the city that we met and it's where our family is based oh that's so wholesome yes I love it yeah a little bit more urban than probably like what people would consider a New Zealand wedding to be no love love so now tell me obviously you're good at saving we're going to need to know where the money's coming from what do you do for work and how much money do you earn so I work for the government in communications and I earn 105k a year before tax ah in New

dollars obviously and pervy what does your partner do and how much does he earn so he's in government too and he earns i think around 115k new zealand before tax so and you guys don't do superannuation you do kiwi saver how much do you contribute to your kiwi saver i contribute 10 which is the maximum amount just because yeah it's not so great is Australia and yeah so I put in 10% myself and then my employer contributes 3% which isn't amazing I'd love it to be higher but yeah. 13% in total is higher than what our current 11% superannuation rate is at so not too bad and does that money come out of your 105? Yeah so the 10% is out of my 105 and the 3% is yeah from my employer separately. And to be pervy, I know how this works, but I feel like it's fun to

dive in when you've got someone from overseas. So does that money then go into your account and then you transfer it out? Or is this something that you get to set up through your employer and it just gets direct debited straight into your KiwiSaver? Like what was the process? Yeah, it's the latter. So it all gets taken out and goes directly to my KiwiSaver provider. So I can't see it or touch it yeah yeah which is probably for the best yes now we've spoken about your wedding and we've spoken about your big honeymoon are there any other big money goals on the horizon that I should know about we're continuing to save for the wedding so we've got about 5k more that we need to make between now and then and the other thing is because as you've

correctly pointed out I am quite a planner I wanted to build up a little bit of a like post-travel fund for what we want to do when we get back from the six months of travel so my partner's quite keen to move across to Oz actually yeah come live over here we're really nice yeah the weather always looks nice too so ah don't move to Melbourne then yeah so that's definitely something that we're kind of trying to work towards but we definitely have a couple of other bigger fish to fry in terms of money goals so that's not quite as high a priority just at the moment. Now you mentioned a post-travel fund tell me a bit more about that because what are you doing with work like have you just said to your work hey I'm going on leave

and they were like no worries money diarist we'll see you when you return like what's the plan with your jobs because six months is a lot to ask from an employer. Yeah so we've planned to resign we haven't handed in our notices yet that will probably happen soon but yeah so the post travel fund is really I guess like giving us a bit of a buffer for when we either come back or decide to move across the ditch and just kind of set up whether that's yeah rent food just so we're not having to stress too much about dipping into other savings I quite like having just like a little fund there that I can pull from that makes a lot of sense how do you feel about resigning like I don't know I'm an anxious girlie that gives me anxiety yeah I'm definitely a little

bit nervous but I have quite a good relationship with my manager so I figured if I just give her as much notice as possible and leave everything like super tidy hopefully it will go okay but yeah I can't say I'm like looking forward to the conversation no I can totally understand that and is there any opportunity do you think that your employers would turn around and go all right well you're a really good employee we can give you six months of unpaid leave and then come back is that an option on the table do you think? I mean maybe. I mean you might not want to come back if you want to move to Australia so who knows? Who knows I think maybe that would be an option but I think I probably haven't been at the company long enough. Yeah that's fair. But I mean if they did offer it

I would probably seriously consider it. Yeah it's nice having the idea of financial security when you return in your head. Yes, definitely. Totally understand. All right, let's go to a really quick break. On the flip side, I have so many questions for you about investing and debt and good and bad money habits. So guys, don't go anywhere. All right, Money Diarist, I feel like you're probably going to say yes to this because you just seem like a savvy planner. You already told me about how your mum operated the finances. You told me about your KiwiSaver and how she like pushed you into that. So the next question is, do you have any investments? If so, what are they? How do they work? I do. Obviously KiwiSaver that mum helped me set up. I've got about 50k in there, which I'm

pretty happy with. And then I've got about 38k in ETFs. Oh, how did you get into that? That's a lot. You're just a baby. So I was unemployed over COVID and I had a lot of time on my hands and I started looking into, I guess, like your podcast and other kind of like money education podcasts. And I was like, oh my God, this looks like mean. Why haven't I thought about this? And my brother works in finance. And so he was like quite encouraging and he'd done it himself. And he was like, yeah, you should do it. definitely do it. Yeah. So I knew that I like, I'm not a huge risk taker and I wanted something that I'm not a maths girl. So I was like, I want to do something that's not too hard and is quite

like passive. Biggest misconception in investing is that you have to be good at maths. You do not have to be good at maths to do investing and do it well. I think obviously like I'm a bit of a maths girly, but I'm low key a little bit disappointed with how little maths is involved in investing I was stoked when I started doing it and I was like oh this is actually like quite passive I don't really have to do much like I can understand how people find the like process a little bit daunting but yeah so the 38k is kind of spread between the Oz top 50 companies NZAU so it's pretty standard stuff and I just have like a monthly or a quarterly payment that goes through and it just does its thing. And I'm very lazy about it, to be honest.

But that's the best, right? Like good investing actually should be really boring. And I don't mean to throw investing platforms that try and make it really engaging under the bus. But at the same time, you go, well, actually, it should be boring because it should be quite passive, especially with the strategy you've gone with. You're like, I'm really conservative. I've gone with an ETF. There shouldn't actually be a lot of ongoing maintenance with this except for contributing regularly. Full stop, end of story. Like it actually can be that easy. So obviously your brother worked in finance. What platform did you choose to invest with? I've used InvisNow, which I think is a New Zealand platform. It is. I did look into Sharesies, but InvisNow had

slightly lower fees. You know what? There's something different for everybody. Like I could not care less who you use as long as you are investing, my friend. Like I get such gratification out of knowing that there are so many people in our community who are putting themselves first. Like 38K, how old were you again? When I first started, I would have been 24, 25. So a baby. Babies are investing and they are putting themselves first and they are going to be wealthy, wealthy people in the future. I love it. It makes me so, so happy. So is that the extent of your investments? There is one more, but I can't claim I did this myself. so that's okay we have a inheritance that we received from his family so that's 160k invested

in managed funds I think and the managed fund thing was his decision he didn't really fully understand I think he just wanted that kind of security of a managed fund and he wanted quite a hands-off approach so that's worked for him so yeah that's the extent of it all can I be really pervy about this you said your partner's inheritance obviously you're not married yet but the way that you're talking about it is very like it's kind of like ours it's a joint asset how do you guys view that obviously you're about to get married so like yes it is basically a joint asset but these conversations can be quite confronting and often we have them you know hypothetically in the community we'll be like oh what if you got an inheritance and is it your

partners or not how did that conversation actually play out in reality like when this happened like was this a like we're joint decision making like how did that work so when it first happened we weren't quite de facto yet so we hadn't been living together for three years so it was very much his obviously like with getting married and with everything that's happened to mum we've decided we really want to be a real unit when it comes to our finances so we've had quite a lot of chance about like you know sharing like I know completely sharing isn't for everyone but I think for us we've decided that's the approach we want to take just because we've seen what happens where like I guess with like mum and dad they thought they were sharing and then turned out they weren't and

it became really stressful and like a kind of traumatic situation so for us we kind of sat down and quite recently at the start of this year we sort of talked through like our various investments and how we want to go about yeah I guess making them shared so I think we'll make an appointment with the fund and try and get the names you added yeah yeah me added yeah that's one it's always just interesting asking about that stuff because it is pervy and I appreciate that it's a very pervy topic that you probably weren't like oh he's gonna ask me about this but I just know that people listening are gonna go oh that's really interesting actually how it actually came to fruition and when your mum passed away is there an inheritance there or is that there will basically

passed everything to dad and that will be a conversation for hopefully 50 60 years in the future yeah so everything has been passed to dad but partially because he hasn't been super aware of his own finances and he's had to like rely on us for a bit of support we kind of know what's there yeah and he's been very open about like talking about what the options would look like for receiving an inheritance later on once he's passed away but also he's kind of said he's open to like a portion of it earlier if we needed support with like a house or something. So yeah, I feel quite lucky that he's been really honest and upfront about that kind of stuff. So yeah, that's very cool. And I think that, you know, having worked in this space,

quick refresher, I used to work as a financial advisor, which I think everybody knows, but I either worked with ultra high net wealth people or people who were dealing with a inheritance. And I feel like when that conversation comes up in a situation like yours, getting an inheritance in advance would probably have been a really awkward conversation even if it ever came up it wouldn't have been really an option they would be like what the hell and now something really traumatic has happened you've lost your mom I think your dad is probably do you think his mindset on it has shifted to actually life is really fragile I'd love to see my kids thrive while I'm around do you think that there has been like a big mindset shift around the

way I guess life is approached now too yeah for sure like I think that's a massive reason why we are obviously going traveling like we know that like mum was one year off retiring no what a stitch up I know so it was really shitty um she and dad had all these plans for seeing the world and traveling together because they never really got to do that and I think like for my partner and I we're like okay well we need to do that because you know it's not a given that you're going to make it to retirement so like there needs to be a balance between making reasonable contributions to KiwiSaver but also having a life and enjoying life while it's here and I think same said for dad like we've been really encouraging him to you know grab life by

the horns and make sure he lives his life his retirement like for mum as well like yeah that he goes to the places that they wanted to go to even if it's a little bit different and just yeah enjoy everything while it's here yeah and I know it's not even been a year yet because you said last year my mum passed away how's your dad doing I'm like really proud of him to be honest he's been a real trooper like it was such a shock we just weren't anticipating it at all it happened when they were on holiday oh no and it's just such a massive mindset shift like he and mum had such a plan for retirement they were gonna like you know probably move out of the family home and find somewhere to live and do all this travel and now he's like well where am I gonna go it feels

like such a massive decision who am I gonna travel with who am I just like you know talking to about silly things like how your day's been it's so true though you just take all of it for granted even though you don't mean to until something like this happens yeah definitely so it's been huge like I said earlier mum she was kind of running the household so he's been like learning how to kind of cook again and you know all that kind of stuff too so he's really taken it in his stride like I know he'll be fine but I think it's been a rocky road and I think there's probably still quite a lot to cross before things are kind of like at some kind of semblance of normal ah well sending you and your family lots and lots of love thank you I do want to ask now though what do you think

your best money habit is do you think it came from your mum I think so I have a sneaky suspicion that might be the case yeah I think she was so organized I think I can't say that I'm nearly as organized as she was but I think you're getting there yeah baby steps the planning streak is there I'm quite good at delayed gratification so I don't impulse spend very often but that probably leads in to my worst money habit as well which is like getting quite stressed about spending money or like feeling guilty if I spend money because I think on the flip side of all this like I think that you know life is short and I should spend and then on the other side of things I'm like, well, something could happen and I might need it really quickly. So I'm sort of like

navigating that. Finding a balance is important and really hard. And maybe I will do a podcast on finding balance, but like the whole podcast would be like, there's actually no right or wrong. Balance for you looks different to me and even looks different to my partner, even though we live in the same house. And just like you and your partner, share finances completely connected. So I find it, yeah, really, really interesting. But it's one of those things that I think you're consistently working on is what does it look like? And right now, obviously there's a lot that you're going through, but then you're also planning some really big things. So balance right now is probably going to look a lot different to, you know,

in five or 10 years time when you're like, oh, we really want to settle down. We want to do this. We want to do that. And balance will look differently again. Like even me right now, going through this whole process of having a baby, I'm like, wait, my priorities are shifting. People told me this would happen and I didn't believe them. I was like, no, I'm a money queen. Like, I'm all over this. Don't worry, guys. I've changed everything.

Like, it's really obnoxious. It's really important to kind of like always readdress it, but it's nice to be open and honest about like, oh, that does make me anxious. Maybe having a think about why could help you, I guess, guide forward. Money Diarist, I feel like we have talked a lot. this has been a beautiful eye-opening chat thank you so much for sharing I guess so much about your mama like it's so nice to talk about people who are no longer here because you know their spirit lives on but I also just feel like sometimes in hindsight we get to learn so much through them

still as well for sure but at the start of the episode you said oh I think I'm a b plus to an a minus and I was like okay no worries and like I couldn't agree more but like what would it take to get to an A plus? Like what would that look like in your eyes? I think it would be like being more like confident in the way that I'm choosing to spend and like I guess structure my money. I think that's probably what it would be. I think knowing that it's probably all going to be fine and not trying to kind of second guess all my decision making and just being like no this is what is working for me and I'm happy with that and I'm not second guessing myself. I think that would be for me what it would take to get to an A+. Love. Unfortunately, that is all we have time

for today. Money Diarist, it has been beautiful chatting to one of our friends across the ditch. I wouldn't be mad if you came and lived in Australia, like we would be better off for it. But it has been so nice chatting to you. I feel like I've got a lot out of this diary and I know that a lot of people in our community have as well. So thank you. It's really appreciated. Thank you so much. The advice shared on She's On The Money is general in nature and does not consider your individual circumstances. She's On The Money exists purely for educational purposes

and should not be relied upon to make an investment or financial decision. If you do choose to buy a financial product, read the PDS, TMD and obtain appropriate financial advice tailored towards your needs. Victoria Devine and She's On The Money are authorised representatives of Money Sherpa PTY LTD ABN 321 649 27708 AFSL 451 289.