SortMe Money

Three weeks ago, SpaceX became a public company — the biggest float in history, raising about US$75 billion. Shares priced at US$135, opened higher, closed day one at US$160.95 (+19%), then ran to US$225.64 on 16 June with the company briefly worth more than US$2.6 trillion. A week later they were back at US$147, wiping out more than US$600 billion in value. They now sit around US$160, almost exac...

Check the KiwiSaver line on your last payslip. Two numbers moved in April, assuming you were on the default 3%, and you didn't have to do a thing for either of them: your deduction is now 3.5% and your employer has to at least match it. On $80,000 that half-percent is roughly $7.70 a week out of your pay. What your employer adds looks like the same amount on paper. It isn't, quite, once...

Your fixed mortgage rate has an end date, and there's a decent chance it lands between now and next winter — 68% of New Zealand's fixed-rate home loans are due to reprice in the 12 months from early 2026. A few weeks out, your bank will email you. The email offers a refix: pick a new term from a short list, tap a button, done inside a minute. What the email doesn't say is that the e...

You feel inflation at the supermarket long before you read about it in the news. A trolley that ran you $200 a year ago is closer to $206 now. That might not seem like much, but the increased power bill, the higher insurance renewal and the rent increase quietly add up. New Zealand's annual rate hit 3.1% in early 2026 — a notch above the top of the Reserve Bank's 1–3% target band, and af...

Picture the Sunday-night version of this. One partner has the banking app open on the couch, the other is squinting at a Hnry summary on their phone, and there's a Google Sheet on the laptop that stopped being accurate around the time the second kid arrived. Salary lands fortnightly. The side hustle money turns up whenever it turns up. A distribution from the business shows up twice a year, a...

A BNZ ad for a 1.6% "high-interest" savings account. That doesn't even keep pace with inflation. The default narrative is that a savings account means whatever your own bank put in front of you — and on the four big banks' everyday savings pages, you're looking at 0.05% to 0.40%. A household with $50,000 sitting in an everyday account at 0.10% is earning $50 a year in inte...

The most expensive thing about being self-employed in New Zealand isn't tax. It's the deductible business expense that came off your personal credit card in November and never made it to the accountant in March. A self-employed Kiwi on the 33% marginal rate who misses $4,000 of legitimate business deductions a year is overpaying IRD by roughly $1,320 — every year. Across five years that&...

If you've got a trust, a rental or a side business, you know the March routine. Your accountant emails asking for the year's transactions, the rental statements, and "any receipts you've got." You lose a weekend exporting CSVs from three different banking logins and diving through 100,000 emails looking for receipts. Then a fortnight later comes the harder email: what was...

A decade ago, as Opes Partners' Ed McKnight puts it, "every man and his dog had a trust." That default has quietly collapsed — three regulatory shifts (the Trusts Act 2019, the 39% trustee tax rate, and tighter IRD disclosure) have raised the bar for needing one. But every law-firm page online still answers the same generic question: what is a trust? That's almost never what a...

Search traffic for "when to see a financial advisor" in NZ has doubled in the last year. The question almost every SortMe user eventually asks is some variant of: is my situation complicated enough to warrant an advisor yet? The honest answer, says SortMe Chief Customer Officer Charlotte Barraclough, is rarely about the size of the portfolio — it's about whether the decisions on you...

Most NZ households know their credit score matters when they apply for a mortgage — but the number that actually runs their life is the one they look at once a month and interpret from vibes. Apps tell you how much you spent. Banks tell you what your balance is. Neither tells you whether the cashflow position underneath is healthy or quietly fraying. In this episode, SortMe Resident Money Writer H...

You earned an extra $20,000 this year. Twelve months on, the bank balance is roughly the same, the car is a year newer, the family went somewhere warmer in July, and the kitchen finally got the renovation that was always "in a couple of years". The pay rise arrived. The savings didn't. That's lifestyle creep, and it's the most common pattern SortMe sees in its data — and t...

Sharesies, Hatch, and Kernel turned the NZ share market from something Kiwis read about in the Weekend Herald into something you can open on the couch — fractional shares of Apple or Nvidia from $5, an S&P 500 ETF bought in 90 seconds, the full US market in your phone, in NZD, anytime. Most coverage treats it as a straight "which app should I pick?" question. SortMe Founder & CEO...

Should you keep your money joint, separate, or somewhere in between? After thousands of onboarding calls and customer interviews with NZ households, SortMe Founder & CEO Carl Thompson thinks that's the wrong question. The real one is how two incomes should actually flow through one household — where each pay lands, how the bills get paid, where each partner gets some autonomy, and how any...

Budgeting every dollar sucks. It's also impossible. Traditional budgeting apps ask you to pre-allocate "lunches: $80" or "kids' activities: $50" in January and expect reality to obey — one week leftovers are free, the next you're buying every day; one weekend the sun is out and the kids are at the park, the next you're paying for movies, ten-pin bowling and...

If you've been saving for your first home, the recent NZ housing headlines probably gave you whiplash. January and February both posted year-on-year declines in sales volumes — the first back-to-back drop in nearly three years — and most of the commentary framed it as the start of a cool-down. Then the March REINZ data landed and complicated the story: 7,853 sales nationally, the busiest mont...

For NZ households who've outgrown bank apps and spreadsheets, PocketSmith vs SortMe is often the next comparison they hit — both NZ-built, both go well beyond basic budgeting, and both are recommended by financial advisors. Most coverage frames it as a feature-by-feature shootout. SortMe Founder & CEO Carl Thompson thinks the deeper difference between the two products is a category one, n...

Working out your real net worth sounds simple — add up what you own, subtract what you owe. The catch is that for most NZ households, no one actually sits down to do it until something forces the question: tax time, a mortgage application, or a meeting with an accountant. SortMe CEO and Co-Founder Carl Thompson thinks the gap between what most Kiwis think they're worth and what they actually...

If you're searching "switch KiwiSaver", the question underneath is almost always one of two: should I? or how do I? The second one is easy — the transfer takes ten minutes online and a few business days in the background. The first is where the real decision sits, and it's the one most Kiwis quietly leave in the too-hard basket year after year. SortMe Chief Customer Officer Cha...

If you're searching "mortgage break fee NZ", you're really asking one question: is it worth paying the fee to get a lower rate now? The honest answer is "it depends on three numbers, and most households don't have them in front of them when they're deciding." Most people assume the maths is too complex, so they wait it out and stick with their existing rate...

91 octane in Auckland sat at $2.50 a litre at the start of March. Six weeks later it's $3.04 — a 20% jump on a non-discretionary line item with no warning, and economists are openly discussing $4 a litre as a realistic scenario if Middle East tensions don't ease. Most coverage frames it as a pump-price story. SortMe and Jamie Reynolds, financial adviser at Naked Finance (FSP596030), thin...

The Reserve Bank has cut the official cash rate nine times — from 5.5% in August 2024 down to 2.25% — and Westpac's economists are calling it an "economic turning point" for New Zealand. On paper, the recovery is here. But most Kiwi households, even high earners, still aren't feeling it on their bank statements. SortMe CEO and Co-Founder Carl Thompson and Nick Crawford, General...

Credit card spending in New Zealand fell 1.1% year-on-year in February 2026 — the first negative reading since the COVID disruptions of 2020. Most coverage ran with a "Kiwis are scared to spend" story. SortMe CEO and Co-Founder Carl Thompson thinks that's only half of what's happening. Drawing on what SortMe sees across thousands of connected household accounts, this episode ma...

A good financial advisor can change the trajectory of a household. A poorly-matched one costs you year after year. With around 1,500 advisors on the NZ Financial Service Providers Register, how do you choose? In this episode: The two kinds of financial advisor in NZ (and which one you probably need) What advisors actually do for you — and what they don't The three fee models: fee-only, fee-pl...

High earners don't budget because they think they don't need to. The data says otherwise. SortMe's Chief Customer Officer Charlotte Barraclough spends her days looking at the financial positions of everyday Kiwi households — the dual incomes, the rental properties, the two KiwiSavers sitting with banks, the Sharesies account, the accountant who handles tax but not personal wealth. A...