Insights
Your Money with Mary Holm on Radio New Zealand

Ana Dermer

24 October, 2023

18min Listen

Mary Holm is a regular guest on Afternoons with Jessie Mulligan where she shares ideas about ways to boost your savings and includes insights from her book Rich Enough.

Mary Holm is a finance journalist and a regular guest on Afternoons with Jessie Mulligan where she shares ideas about ways to boost your savings and includes insights from her book Rich Enough.

In this episode Mary recommends setting goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, (w)ritten and time-bound, and about having small rewards when you reach milestones.

She talks about a piece of research that wealth development platform Sharsies undertook about the outcomes for regular vs casual investors. Regular investors put money into their investments regularly, for instance after every paycheck (on Sharsies they call it Auto-Invest). Casual investors put money in every now and again.

Both groups put about the same amount into Funds annually with the most common choices being Pathfinder funds (active managers) and Smart Traders (an index fund). Interestingly the results show the regular investors doing better as their casual equivalents.

“They have higher average returns, and increasingly so, the bigger the gap with a 5-7 percentage point gap between the regular and casual investors”.

It’s based on the technical investing term “dollar cost averaging” – but what does that mean? Mary explains what it is and why regular amounts into your KiwiSaver, or any other fund that has a fluctuating value, will be better off with regular payments rather than one off contributions.

“Put yourself on the list of bills to be paid [so you are contributing to your savings regularly]”, says Mary

Listen to the podcast here

Ana Dermer

Ana is a marketing and communications specialist with a strong design and sustainability background that spans over 20 years. She is passionate about helping good companies promote good in the world as a way of staying positive about the future and leaving a legacy for future generations. She has Bachelor of Commerce and Diploma in Multimedia Design from the University of Otago. She has also completed courses in interior design, skiing and photography - her favourite hobbies.