New Zealand Conservative

Many of you may have heard the annoying KiwiSaver advertisement that plays on the radio, that sounds like a happy song, but is in effect a song of doom. It basically repeats with, I'm going to work till I die, over and over again. I actually don't know how it finishes anymore, because the ad offends me so much that I turn off the radio every time I hear it now. So, whatever advertisements are after it, I don't hear them, because the radio is off and sometimes doesn't even get turned on again. You hear that, NewsTalkZB!!! It offends me on multiple levels. The first, the implication that working until you die is not good. But working is good. People who retire and have nothing to do tend to die faster than if they just kept working. Retirement can be a death sentence. Then there's my dad, who died at age 65/66* of cancer. He got the diagnosis, retired and then died six months later. He effectively worked until he died. Finally, there's all the mo...

Kiwis with $1000 or more to spare are being targeted in the Government's first big power company float - with the promise of bonus shares if they hold on to them. We just don't have thousands of dollars lying around doing nothing. We actually owe quite a bit of money on our mortgage, and it looks like we're going to have to extend it to buy a new car soon, as our 1997 Mitsubishi with 250K on the clock is on it's last wheels. Now that I think about it however, we do have our super schemes in Australia. If the Government could think of a way of transferring some of our super money over from Aussie, we might actually think about using that to buy shares. Or pay off some of the mortgage - it would be a difficult choice. Related link: $1000 to buy a share of NZ

I am a superannuation cynic. I have no problem with it being a choice, but any whiff of compulsion gets me very nervous. You see, I have experienced the "joys" of compulsory super in Australia. When we left in 2003, we had already lost half the money that we'd put into our compulsory super schemes since the compulsion in Australia began. Things had got so bad with super schemes at that time, that in desperation, we had set up our own private super scheme and just put the money in the bank. It was cheaper paying all the fees to do this than it was to continue to lose money in the way that we had been. It was the smartest super decision we had made, and stopped the haemorrhaging of what little was left of our money. Australia's equivalent of the Financial Services Council at the time had the gall to suggest that if super contributions were raised to 20% of income, then all would be sweet. What's more to the point, if the super scheme companies only took ...