SortMe Money

SortMe.com - Financial wellbeing made easy

SortMe Money is the podcast for New Zealanders who want their money to work harder without having to think about it constantly. Each episode turns our most-read articles into audio — practical insights on spending, saving, investing, and the everyday financial decisions that quietly shape your life. Made by the team behind SortMe, NZ's AI-powered personal finance app.

  1. Oct 12

    Christmas is 10 weeks away. Here's how to pay for it before it arrives.

    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 Day is a Friday this year, which leaves ten Fridays between 16 October and the day itself — and a $2,000 Christmas works out at $200 a week if you start this Friday. The presents are rarely what does the damage. The most expensive day of a Kiwi Christmas is some time in January, when the December credit card bill falls due. In this episode, SortMe Resident Money Writer Hugo Jonston runs the ten-week plan for keeping Christmas inside Christmas — the two lists that give you a real number, the automatic-payment setup that makes the money arrive without you remembering, how to treat Black Friday as part of the plan rather than a shopping spree, and why BNPL at Christmas is the trap that lands half its payments in January alongside the card bill and the back-to-school stationery list. In this episode: Why Christmas is a planning problem not a budgeting one — it arrives on the same date every year, so it belongs in short-term savings next to the car excess and next winter’s flightsThe real-number method — pull November through to the end of January from every bank and card statement, because the lists always miss the extra groceries and the last-minute presentsThe two lists that do most of the work — one for people (every name with a dollar figure, including teacher gifts, Secret Santa, and the December birthday parties), one for everything else (food and drink, petrol or flights to see family, hosting, the summer holiday, and January)The Fridays-you-have-left maths — ten weekly pays or five fortnightly pays from 16 October, so a $2,000 Christmas is $200/week or $400/fortnight, with every week you wait making the remaining payments biggerThe October conversations that go a lot better than the December ones — Secret Santa for the adults with a $50 limit, and who’s bringing what if you’re hostingTreating Black Friday (27 November, seven Fridays in) as part of the plan — write down what you’re buying, today’s price, and where; last year Black Friday was 2025’s busiest non-food shopping day at $55.6m on Worldline’s networkWhy the sale label doesn’t tell you which deals are real — Consumer NZ found 77% of tracked products in 2023 could have been bought for the same price or less in the weeks before Black Friday, and in 2025 half of the tracked products had the same or a bigger discount at some point in the previous three monthsThe card as convenience vs the card as the plan — the 40+ years of evidence that people spend more by card than cash, the 29% of US accounts regularly paying only the minimum (anchored on the printed figure), and the illustrative $400 of interest a $2,000 Christmas left on a 20% card costs you over a yearWhy BNPL at Christmas is the worst version of BNPL — four fortnightly payments on a mid-December gift lands half of them in January, Harvard research finding spending rises and stays higher once BNPL starts, and the Which? UK finding of nearly a quarter of users spending more than they meant toThe January line most people forget — anything on the card the Christmas account hasn’t paid for, the uniforms and stationery, and an extra week of groceries for the long wait to the first pay of the yearWhere SortMe fits — categorised spend so last November to January shows up as one usable total, a new Xmas26 tag you can add to every Christmas purchase as it happens so you get a real total by the end of January, the four-account structure with automatic transfers filling Christmas on payday, and a cashflow forecast that shows the January bills before January landsRead the full article: sortme.com/post/plan-for-christmas-nz

  2. Oct 7

    Good debt vs bad debt: which debts to keep and which to clear first

    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 offer puts the mortgage in one column and the credit card in the other and leaves it there. That sorts the debts by product type, and it tells the couple in Mt Eden with the villa, the car on finance, the everyday card, the Shopify overdraft and a shareholder current account nothing about what each one is doing to the move to a bigger house in the next eighteen months. In this episode, SortMe Resident Money Writer Hugo Jonston runs every household debt through the two questions the chart skips — what did the borrowing buy and will that thing be worth more or less later, and what does it cost to hold if a rate moves or one income pauses — and lands on an honest order of operations for anyone who wants a bigger mortgage inside two years. In this episode: The limit-not-balance trap — how a $15,000 card limit set years ago quietly sits in the servicing calculation on the day you ask for the mortgage, and the broker practice of cutting it six months before you applyMortgage — still the strongest case for borrowing most people will ever have, and why the fix end date decides more than the rate (especially if you plan to sell before it ends)Business borrowing — the productive overdraft that funds pre-Christmas stock vs the overdrawn shareholder current account the household has effectively taken out of the company and now owes backStudent loan — interest-free while you live in NZ, the cheapest money you’ll ever borrow, but still reduces what the bank will lend because the compulsory repayments come out of your payCar loan — why the deal that tips sensible to expensive is the size of the car (the one the household needs vs the one it would like to be seen in), and the Consumer NZ case of a $7,000 car that cost nearly $30,000 over four years at ~30% dealer finance with add-ons rolled in; $20k over five years costs ~$38,800 at 30% vs ~$25,500 at 10%Credit cards — the US research finding 29% of accounts regularly pay at or near the minimum (anchored by the printed figure), the 40+ years of evidence that people spend more by card than cash, and the $1,600/year you quietly pay on an $8,000 balance at 20% before touching the principalBuy now, pay later — why we don’t think anyone should use it, the Harvard finding that spending rises once BNPL starts and stays higher, NZ BNPL arrears running at 7.1% in June vs 3.8% for credit cards, and the broker guidance to clear plans and close accounts three months before applyingHow households end up in a debt trap — never one big loan they couldn’t afford, but a car, a higher limit, a BNPL couch and a mortgage top-up for the deck, each judged against this month’s income rather than everything already owing, and why a good couple of months is the dangerous time to say yesHow much is too much — inside the RBNZ debt-to-income ceiling, the figure worth knowing is how much of take-home leaves as debt repayments each month and what it looks like if rates rise a point or the side hustle has a flat six monthsThe order of operations before a bigger mortgage — cut the card limit, clear anything at card or personal-loan rates, address large car finance, leave the student loan alone, and the live question of extra mortgage repayments vs keeping the deposit liquid (inside two years, keep it liquid)Why an application that understates your spending to get the loan through leaves you making the repayments — read the living-expenses figure before you sign, and the FMA’s active mortgage-fraud investigationsWhere SortMe fits — the Clarity stage of the Money Journey putting every account, every loan and the business overdraft into one view, with debts against assets tracked month to month so you can answer the question the chart never asks: is this borrowing lifting what we own, or funding what we spend?Read the full article: sortme.com/post/good-debt-vs-bad-debt-nz

  3. Sep 8

    Income protection insurance in NZ: where ACC stops and your risk starts

    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 cover because the premium looked untenable. In this episode, SortMe Resident Money Writer Hugo Jonston sits down (on paper) with Jamie Reynolds, a financial adviser at Naked Finance in Auckland, who spends his weeks across the table from couples like this. ACC is one of the few institutions that works well — "Let's establish first off that ACC is a really good thing" — but the scheme was built to leave out illness, sickness, contagious disease, stress and emotional conditions, ageing-related conditions, most hernias, and gradual-process injuries. And its own numbers (a ~$9.8B shortfall in the 2025 Annual Report, plus a January 2026 Turnaround Plan) point to it getting stricter rather than kinder. So the events most likely to take you out of work for half a year are the ones ACC was designed to leave out — and the part it does cover is being trimmed. In this episode: What ACC actually covers (weekly compensation up to 80% of pre-injury income, usually from day 8) and the list ACC itself publishes of what it doesn't — starting with illness and running through ageing conditions and gradual-process injuriesThe financial signal underneath — ~$63.6B outstanding claims liability against ~$53.8B in assets, and Jamie's read: "because it's massively oversubscribed and we're seeing more and more applications declined, looking after yourself is becoming more and more of a requirement rather than just a good idea"The household running uncovered — two incomes now one-and-a-half because of parental leave or three days around daycare, mortgage approved on both full salaries, and a premium that looks impossible when the surplus has already gone on nappies and the car seatThe wider context — the Financial Services Council's Financial Resilience Index 2026 finding 59% of New Zealanders saying money has affected their mental health, and job-security confidence dropping from 85% to 80% since 2024Why income protection is expensive on purpose — Jamie: "it's expensive for a reason. It's one of the most claimed-on insurances out there" — and why life cover on a healthy 40-year-old is cheap by comparisonWhy there is no universal order of importance across income protection, trauma, life, TPD and health — every case is subjective, comparison sites are paid per policy, and "it depends on your household" doesn't convertThe five-year check every adviser runs — new job, second child, rent to mortgage, partner going self-employed — any one makes a five-year-old policy the wrong size, and most households have had two or threeWhy the number the household brings to the meeting is everything — Jamie: without a real after-tax income and monthly spend figure, "it is a best-guess scenario" that can be out by a thousand dollars a month either wayThe $1,200-a-month couple — paying that for life cover for years until a proper review found they were self-insured with no need for it; $14,400 a year redirected to savings, a term of school fees or a very good family holiday sitting inside one unread policyWhere SortMe's Protection area fits — every policy you already hold in one register with documents attached, real after-tax income and monthly spend on tap for the adviser conversation, warnings before a policy renews or the card it's paid from expires, and plain-language flags for a mortgage with no life cover, income doing the heavy lifting with no income protection, or cover that hasn't been reviewed since before the kids or the houseRead the full article: sortme.com/post/income-protection-insurance-nz

  4. Aug 24

    Index funds vs picking stocks in NZ: fewer than 1 in 5 pros beat the index

    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 10 years, 84% of professional US large-cap managers underperform the S&P 500. Over 15 years, 89.5% do. If they can't beat it, the odds that you will, picking stocks yourself on Sharesies or Tiger Brokers, are poor. In this episode, SortMe Resident Money Writer Hugo Jonston walks through one of the most replicated findings in finance — how often the professionals beat the market, why the few who manage it are mostly lucky, and what the evidence says about the best way to grow your money over the long run. SortMe Founder & CEO Carl Thompson shares the moment he learned the comparison on his own money: after selling his previous company, he kept a Sharesies account for picking companies himself while the bulk of the proceeds went into professionally managed funds. "I was picking stocks because I found it fun and interesting, and my picks were returning about 14 percent, which felt great. Then I compared it with the managed funds (running on Fama basis), which were doing 22. Side by side, the two numbers ended the argument. There was no point in me doing individual trading, and the only reason I'd never noticed was that I'd never made the comparison." In this episode: The SPIVA scoreboard — 65% of US large-cap funds underperform the S&P 500 over 1 year, 84% over 10 years, 89.5% over 15 years, and the pattern gets worse the longer you measureWhy the winners are mostly lucky — William Sharpe's Arithmetic of Active Management (as a group, active managers cannot beat the index after costs), Fama and French's Luck versus Skill study, and the S&P Persistence Scorecard showing not one of 2020's top-quartile US funds was still there four years laterWhy the whole premise of picking stocks is thin — Fama's efficient-markets insight that a share's price already reflects the publicly available information, leaving only two possible edges (illegal insider information, or a guess about a future nobody knows)The Barber and Odean bombshell — Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth: heavy individual traders averaged 11.4%/year while the market returned 17.9%, and a later day-trading study found fewer than 1% made money predictably after costsThe comparison that hides the damage — $10,000 at 11.4% becomes ~$87,000 over 20 years; at 17.9% it becomes ~$269,000. You can be in the green and still losing a house deposit to the boring option, and unless you make the comparison you'll never feel itCarl's own 14% vs 22% moment — the amateur picker sits below the pros, and the pros mostly sit below the index; each rung up the ladder involves less picking, not moreThe design language of the apps — green numbers, notifications, watchlists, one-tap buy buttons, and the trading-platform business model that earns more the more you trade (Sharesies 1.9%, 0.5% FX, Tiger Brokers per-order commissions), with zero transaction fee on Sharesies managed fund orders sitting right there in the same appWhy the boring strategy wins — an index fund is a tiny slice of hundreds or thousands of companies at once, no single collapse can wipe you out, and Sharesies itself launched in 2017 offering funds only (individual companies didn't arrive until it joined the NZX mid-2019 — the evidence was baked into the original design)Where SortMe fits — putting KiwiSaver, investments, savings, property and net worth on one screen, so the number you're watching is the total wealth growing over years, and Carl's comparison is on screen for every household from day oneRead the full article: sortme.com/post/index-funds-vs-picking-stocks-nz

  5. Aug 10

    How to stop living payday to payday, even on a good income

    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 KiwiSavers and a stake in a business between them. The income is genuinely good, but at the end of the pay cycle they are left with zero. In this episode, SortMe Resident Money Writer Hugo Jonston explains why living payday to payday gets diagnosed as an income problem when, in a lot of NZ households, the income is already sufficient. What's missing is a clear-eyed view of what's coming, a plan to get there, and a structure that moves the money without you having to think about it. All three causes — the plan that's really a hope, no reference point to weigh a decision against, and a bank setup where committed money and free money sit in the same balance — can be fixed in an evening or two, and once they're fixed they stay fixed. In this episode: Why good incomes still run out — mindset (the raise, the bonus, the business sale that "might" happen and isn't a plan), no plan (no reference point, so every $12-becomes-$18 lunch looks affordable on its own terms), and financial structure (income arrives fortnightly, costs arrive on their own schedule, and nothing absorbs the difference)The base-case rebuild — write down everything your position quietly depends on that you don't control (raise, bonus, business sale, inheritance, a good few years in the market), then design the next five years as if none of it lands on scheduleWhy this matters more than anything else for business owners — a stake in a company is worth something on the day a buyer pays for it, and until that day it can't fund a retirement, cover a redundancy or carry you through a bad yearThe two numbers almost nobody has accurately — real monthly income (fortnightly × 26 ÷ 12; the $400/month gap most households never plan for) and the real minimum cost of running the household (a full year of fixed and semi-regular costs, divided by twelve, so March's insurance renewal and June's rego finally have a monthly price attached)The distance between those two numbers is your means — and a goal with a date behaves completely differently from a goal without one, because a date converts it into a monthly figure you can meet or consciously decide not toThe four-account structure — Household (every committed cost, funded per-pay before anything else moves), Spending (genuinely free money with nothing else claimed against it), Short-term savings (buffer plus known-but-irregular costs), Long-term savings (the account that answers the mindset problem and grows only if funded on purpose)The single move that ends the cycle outright — stop spending this fortnight's pay on this fortnight's life, and build to being at least a full pay cycle aheadWhy the transfers have to be automatic, on payday, in that order — the alternative (spend carefully, save what's left) loses every time, and the mental cost of the "can I?" flicker on every purchase is as expensive as the financial oneWhere SortMe fits — pulling accounts across every bank into one picture (the mortgage with one, everyday with another, the rental or business somewhere else), a Cashflow Forecast that shows what's left once commitments are accounted for, categorisation that works out your household run-rate in about twenty minutes, and the Cashflow Health Score for whether the gap between your pay and your life is widening or closingRead the full article: sortme.com/post/stop-living-payday-to-payday-nz

  6. Jul 22

    The single-income household: how to run a whole house on one wage

    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 everything themselves; someone is parenting solo and doing every job in the house. Different lives, one thing in common — and the advice usually aimed at these households is some version of "spend less," which is both obvious and not very useful. In this episode, SortMe Resident Money Writer Hugo Jonston offers the more honest, more useful version. One income is a different game — the big fixed costs don't scale with the number of earners (rent, power, internet, rates, insurance are the same figure however the household is set up, so a larger share is already committed before you make a single choice about it), and there's less room to soak up a surprise. The goal isn't to earn more or live like a monk. It's to make every dollar visible early enough that you get to make the call on it, instead of finding out after the fact. In this episode: Why one income is a different game — the arithmetic of fixed costs that don't scale with earners, and the smaller cushion for a surprise car repair, dental bill or cut fortnightThe number most people don't have — the fortnightly-to-monthly maths (× 26 ÷ 12) that means budgeting to "double the pay" quietly runs a shortfall ten months a year and a mysterious surplus for twoThe fixed-cost audit that beats two years of feeling bad about takeaways — power (Powerswitch), insurance re-quoting rather than auto-renewing, mortgage refix timing, subscription creep, and attacking credit-card-rate debt firstWhy single-income households need a bigger buffer than the standard rule of thumb — closer to six months than three, treated as a direction rather than a deadline, with the first couple of thousand dollars doing most of the psychological workThe income-protection conversation nobody wants to have — why insuring the wage everything rests on is one of the more sensible things you can do with your money, especially with dependents involvedLetting a good month pay for a lean one — the habit of refusing to let an $80 grocery surplus quietly evaporate into a nicer weekend, and treating the savings pot as where the good months goThe three numbers worth watching weekly — Safe to Spend, fixed costs as a share of income, and buffer measured in weeks not dollars (how long could you keep things running if the income paused on Friday?)Where SortMe fits in a single-income house — categorised spend so the fixed-cost audit takes an evening not a weekend, a real Safe to Spend after commitments (not a balance that lies to you), the surplus-month nudge into savings, and the Cashflow Health Score for the days you don't have the energy to interrogate a spreadsheetA note on real support — MoneyTalks is free and confidential, and Work and Income has entitlements that plenty of working households don't realise apply to themRead the full article: sortme.com/post/single-income-household-nz

  7. Jul 16

    Is the share market bubble about to burst? What a crash really means for NZ investors

    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 2026 round covered 210 of them running about US$555 billion between them. For the first time, an "AI bubble" topped their list of biggest tail risks, named by 45% (up from 28% in June). Then the survey asked them straight out whether AI stocks are in a bubble. 43% said yes. 48% said no. That's the state of expert opinion: a coin flip, held by people with Bloomberg terminals and research teams. In this episode, SortMe Resident Money Writer Hugo Jonston sets aside the unanswerable will it crash? and picks up the entirely knowable one: what would a crash actually do to me? He walks the froth and the earnings evidence on both sides, brackets the range using dot-com and GFC history, and unpicks the single variable that decides whether a 30% drop is an emergency or a non-event — and it isn't your view on AI. It's your time horizon. In this episode: The 43/48 coin flip in BofA's July 2026 Global Fund Manager Survey — and why any article that tells you what happens next should be treated with suspicionThe case for worry — top-10 concentration in the S&P 500 running mid-to-high 30s (double the 1990–2015 average), with 82% of managers calling "long global semiconductors" the most crowded trade on recordThe case against panic — unlike 1999, the mega-caps at the centre of this are enormously profitable, and much of the AI spend is being funded from operating cash flow rather than debt (which is how bubbles fail differently, and far more violently)The two historical brackets — the Nasdaq's 78% dot-com drawdown taking 15 years to reclaim, and the S&P 500's 57% GFC drop taking 5.5 years — and why the depth of the fall tracked how much of the price was supported by real earningsThe anatomy of a 30% drop in your own numbers — $80,000 across KiwiSaver and Sharesies becoming $56,000, a $24,000 loss that grinds over months, and the real danger (the thought that arrives around the third bad month)Why the same drop is a genuine emergency for a March house deposit and a non-event for a 34-year-old's KiwiSaver — and the honest caveat about sequence-of-returns risk in the years either side of retirementThe bit most people get wrong — collapsing risk tolerance and concentration into one question, and how three "diversified" wrappers can quietly be the same handful of US tech companies ridden three timesThe four moves that don't require a view on whether the bubble pops — know your real exposure across every account, know your buffer, match money to time (nothing you need in ~3 years should be in the market, nothing you need in 30 needs to leave it), and write down now what you'll do if it falls 30%Where SortMe fits — a read-only view that connects banks, KiwiSaver and investment platforms so the two numbers this article is about (what you're really holding, and how much cash you'd have to lean on) stop being scattered across five loginsRead the full article: sortme.com/post/share-market-crash

  8. Jul 7

    The IPO trap: why the hottest float is usually the worst place for your savings

    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 exactly where they closed on day one. Anyone who bought near the top is still down close to 30%. The common narrative said this was the chance you couldn't miss. In this episode, SortMe Resident Money Writer Hugo Jonston pulls apart what the research actually says about buying IPOs — and why the "hottest float" is usually the worst place for money you can't afford to lose. The pop you read about isn't the pop you get: that first-day gain went almost entirely to the large institutions allocated shares at the offer price the night before. By the time the shares hit your trading app, you're buying from them, often at the most expensive moment of the stock's life. SortMe Founder & CEO Carl Thompson: "The hardest losses we hear about aren't from people who budgeted badly. They're from people who took money they'd carefully saved — a house deposit, a kid's education fund — and put it on one exciting bet because everyone said it couldn't lose. It almost always can." In this episode: The SpaceX round trip in three weeks — $135 offer, $160.95 first-day close, $225.64 peak, US$600B of value gone in a week, back to $160 todayWhy the first-day pop mostly goes to the institutions who got the offer-price allocation the night before — and why your trading app only opens the door after the price has already re-ratedThe Ritter research every retail investor should know — IPOs bought at first-day close returned ~34% over three years against ~62% for a comparable basket of established companies (about 29% behind); ~65% of IPOs underperform the market over their first three yearsThe floats don't even reliably hold their offer price — ~40% below offer in 2022, 54% below offer in 2023Three floats from the last twelve months, same shape — Figma ($33 offer → $115.50 day one → ~$23 now, down ~80% from day-one close and below offer); Klarna ($40 offer → $52 open → ~$20 now, half the offer price); Circle ($31 offer → $83.23 day-one close → nearly $299 peak → ~$69 now, three-quarters off the frenzy peak)Why floats are sold at maximum optimism — that's when founders, early staff and VCs get the best price for the slice they're sellingThe lock-up clock — 90–180 days after listing, insider selling hits the market, and around 60% of IPO stocks fall around lock-up expiry; the Facebook cautionary tale ($38 → below $18 as lock-ups rolled off in 2012)What a calmer plan looks like — money you need within a few years sits boring; long-run money goes in steadily, spread across many companies, and left alone. It doesn't screenshot well, but it beats the rocket-stock approach for the overwhelming majority of peopleWhere SortMe fits — accounts, KiwiSaver, goals and net worth in one place, so a decision about risk is one you make with the full picture, not in the heat of a chart going vertical. A goal with a number and a date is much harder to gamble away on a Friday afternoon.Read the full article: sortme.com/post/buying-ipo-stocks-nz

About

SortMe Money is the podcast for New Zealanders who want their money to work harder without having to think about it constantly. Each episode turns our most-read articles into audio — practical insights on spending, saving, investing, and the everyday financial decisions that quietly shape your life. Made by the team behind SortMe, NZ's AI-powered personal finance app.