SortMe Money

Inflation was 3.7% in the year to September. Inside New Zealand’s cost of living number, petrol is up 19%, beef mince 23%, electricity 9%, and the average house insurance premium has risen 37% in three years. The things going up fastest are the ones nobody in New Zealand sets the price of — and that changes what you can do about them. The common narrative says it’s politicians and price-gouging su...

Most New Zealand households find Christmas a strain on their finances. Last year nearly two-thirds of Kiwis said they felt some level of financial stress about it, and a quarter planned to lean on credit or buy now, pay later more than the year before. The good news is Christmas is the one big expense that arrives on the same date every year, so you can plan for it like any other bill. Christmas D...

When you apply for the next mortgage, the bank will count your credit card at its limit rather than its balance. Even if you’re using the card for points and paying it off every month, a $15,000 limit sits in the servicing calculation as though you owed it all — and tens of thousands of dollars can come off what they’ll lend you for the bigger house. The good-debt, bad-debt chart most articles off...

Many New Zealanders who stop working for six months or more are sick rather than injured. ACC pays up to 80% of your income if you fall off a ladder — and nothing at all for a cancer diagnosis, a back that gives out over five years, or a breakdown. The household most likely to be caught out is a couple in their late thirties with children and a mortgage approved on two salaries, who deferred the c...

Buying a single company's shares on your phone feels like investing. The app is clean, the ticker goes green, and you tell yourself you've done your homework on this one. It feels like skill. Here's the uncomfortable part: the people who do this for a living — fund managers with Bloomberg terminals, research teams and decades of experience — mostly lose to a simple index fund. Over...

Payday lands Wednesday. By Thursday night the mortgage has gone out, the power bill has taken its cut, the supermarket shop is done, and what's left is smaller than it has any right to be. Then there are thirteen days to get through before it happens again. The households telling us this are often not the ones you'd expect — plenty are on six figures, with a rental investment, two KiwiSa...

Running a whole household on one income takes real skill. One wage covers the rent or mortgage, the power, the groceries, and the kids too if there are kids — and it does it week after week, without a second pay quietly filling the gaps. There are all sorts of ways a household ends up here: one partner is home with the kids, or studying, or unwell, or between jobs; someone lives alone and covers e...

The question turns up everywhere at the moment. In the headlines, in the group chat, from the friend who has never mentioned shares in his life and suddenly wants to know whether he should pull his KiwiSaver out of Growth. Is this an AI bubble? Is it about to pop? The honest answer, worth sitting with for a second: nobody knows. Bank of America surveys global fund managers every month — the July 2...

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...