I Lost Nearly Half A Million And Rebuilt

A childhood of counting coins and watching farm bills pile up can do more than shape habits, it can shape your whole relationship with safety, spending, and self-worth. We sit down with James Buchanan, our mortgage adviser, to trace the real story behind his “saver” instincts, the guilt he still feels after buying something, and how those early experiences built both discipline and anxiety around money. If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t relax when you spend, this conversation will feel uncomfortably familiar in the best way.

From there, we get practical about couple dynamics and personal finance in New Zealand: the planner versus the spontaneous spender, what compromise actually looks like, and why “no surprises” matters more than any perfect budgeting app. James shares how he and Rebecca handle joint accounts, how they talk through financial decisions, and why telling the truth about mistakes is part of teaching kids healthy money skills. It’s honest relationship advice grounded in real household pressure, not theory.

Then the hard part: overconfidence, stepping away from salary income, and a costly investing mistake that he puts at close to half a million dollars. We unpack what went wrong, why selling investments to cover living costs can unravel a plan fast, and how mentors and humility helped him rebuild. We also talk about long COVID, burnout, flexible work, and why the “Instagram life” hides what most of us are carrying.

If you want clearer money mindset habits, smarter investing boundaries, and a more resilient approach to mortgages and wealth building, press play. Subscribe, share this with a mate who needs it, and leave a review with your biggest money lesson.

Transcript

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Opening And Money Stories

SPEAKER_02 0:10

A lot of you know that I love interviewing people on their money stories. And since I had James in the studio, I decided to pick on him today. For those that don't know, James Buchanan works for me as mortgage advisor. And he's joined me last year in April. He's been doing phenomenally well despite all sorts of adversities thrown at him over the last 18 months. Hello, James.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Buongiorno. And he always starts the episodes with that. I've drank too much coffee today, so just bear with me. This could be this could be tedious.

SPEAKER_02 0:41

Okay. So this episode is going to be diving into you and your journey in money, really. And we're gonna start at a very, very young age of

Childhood Saving And Farm Scarcity

SPEAKER_02 0:52

take me back to little James and what did he know about money and what was his relationship with money back then?

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Oh well, I've always, when I was very young, always been a very loved saving my money and collecting money in a big sort of money box. And I would count it every single day and just see how much money I had. And I hated I've always hated spending m money. So I'm a bit thrifty when it comes to that kind of thing. So but I do remember from a very early age. I think I used to go and steal my brother's money and and and add it to my own, and uh and just it it seemed like that was okay, but now as an adult, I can see uh because I used to complain to my parents about it. James is stealing my money again, so because I'm a lot younger than my two brothers. So I I'm I'm not I'm happy to say I don't steal people's money anymore. That was only a young person thing, but I used to love counting it, you know, or you know, back in those days you just had a big box full of coins, and I used to cut a two-litre bottle of you know, like lemonade in half, and you'd put your money into it, and then I'd count it every day and and do various things to try and get it from mum and dad. But I grew up on a farm and so things were pretty tight from a money perspective for most of my younger years until maybe my teens, when my parents sold their farm, and and and things became a little bit more I want to say abundant, but not as tight. I did notice a change there when when they got out of farming, because they would often they were crop farmers, and you know, if you had bad weather, you'd lose the whole crop. So that's your and I always remember how stressed my parents were because they'd just get bills and bills all the time coming every day, but they've got no income.

SPEAKER_02 2:45

So do you think this is where the money mentality came from, where you should just save, save, save and not spend, because in farming you just never know what can happen, and therefore you have to squirrel away everything you have.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

It's weird because I always feel guilty when I spent money. Like if I went and if I went and bought something and then I always had that buyer's remorse type thing afterwards, even if it was and it was the complete one-off type thing. So in that regard, but I've had to moderate myself because when you get married and you start a family, you you really have to what's the word compromise. Like I c I couldn't be the way I was and have a happy family environment. If you've got squirrel away everything. Yeah, if I'm if I'm here I'm judging people and I'd even now I'd hate it when people in my family spend money.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

How do you deal with that?

SPEAKER_01 3:42

I just bury it deep, deep down inside me and don't uh and don't think about it too much. Uh because you know you've got they've got to have people gotta have a life, right? You only live once. So my main thing is know what you love doing and spend your money on that that stuff. So I love cycling and I love investing. So generally speaking, if I've got any if I really want to spend some money, uh it's gonna be on a cycling related thing. And it was really cool that a client got it got me a gift the other day for a $100 voucher at Evo Cycles. So I you know that was super cool. Because I wouldn't go and spend that money myself, even though I've needed a new helmet for maybe three or four years, and my cycling shoes have got holes in them, and my bike's 10 years old, you know, everybody else has got $10,000 bikes. So yeah, I'm really happy just to for myself to just put up with what I have, but I know like I I'm okay with that, but I know other people in my family need to, you know, they're teenagers and they need to look respectable and uh and that sort of thing. So I do compromise a wee bit.

SPEAKER_02 4:59

Do you think your kids are more like you or more like Rebecca?

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Well, her Hannah my daughter, Hannah Marie, she is really uh she's because my mum, we called her, we used to make fun of because she came from German background and she's kind of like a an accountant and she worked at a bank and and she did all the accounts and she was very strict on spending, and that's why my parents were quite successful because they kept she really reined it in when all the other farmers were buying new tractors and machinery and stuff. Dad was building his own mach machinery. Do you know what I mean? He he built everything in our factory, pretty much, not the tractors, but we had we used to call our tractors the Flintstone tractors. I don't know if you remember the Flintstone tractors. Yes, I remember our tractors looked like their cars there back in those days, and but that was what our farm looked like. But if you went to any of the other farms near us, they all had brand new machinery and the latest Mercedes or BMW. But my parents didn't start spending money until they actually really had it. Which was a very unique thing for me because that's what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_02 6:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Like we are building the f we're actually rebuilding our foundation after going through a period of over the last seven or eight years of really losing ground financially for a a number of you know, financial decisions that I did over time. But if you've still got that we still have that financial foundation of knowledge. So I'm very confident in the future, but you've got to be able to I mean the main thing is just don't spend more than you earn. No matter how much money you make, if you're making five hundred thousand dollars a year, you'd be guaranteed people are spending six hundred thousand.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

And that's what we see, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:56

And you will never be successful if you are spending more than you earn, no matter how good you are at anything.

SPEAKER_02 7:02

Because that income is not forever, right? You only have

Planning Vs Spontaneity In Marriage

SPEAKER_02 7:05

a short window of time where you're earning that much money, or you're earning potential stays because you're young, you're healthy, you may be earning that much money. But as you get older and your life changes, or you're growing your family and you may not be working as much, the income sometimes changes. Yeah. How did you find when you met Rebecca and how was her style different to yours when it came to money?

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Okay, so Rebecca and I sort of like opposites attract type thing. So she I'm a planner. Everything I do is planned, you know, quite a long way out. She is quite spontaneous. And so that's really it's really quite funny in a lot of ways because it's very hard if you're a planner to live with somebody who's spontaneous and doesn't really have any goals.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

I'm sure she has them, she just hasn't articulated them.

SPEAKER_01 7:55

But it's like I like to make sure that we're gonna achieve our goals, so I try to get her on paper like what she wants to do in terms of what she really wants to achieve, and then I can plan our finances around trying to get to that. But I you have you can't force people to do that because everybody's different, and I she what she what I believe is she just really wants to enjoy each day doing things that she loves doing and achieving stuff, and so I can't go and put my enforce what I want on her.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

Do you uh so I've sort of got a this is a very good marriage advice out there now, James. For those blocks that are listening, I hope you're taking some notes here that just let the wife enjoy it.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

Be the planner if you are the planner, still plan it out, yeah, but let her to enjoy and give those parameters around where you also feel comfortable that okay, she's spending that, I'm not gonna look at it, I'm not gonna cringe over it. How do you manage money? Do you have separate accounts? Do you have separate?

SPEAKER_01 8:58

No, it's all it's all it's all it's all joint. So everything is talked about. Like even when as when I was managing our cap our investment capital fund, and I'm a huge believer in

Joint Money And Teaching Kids

SPEAKER_01 9:10

that you've got to tell people when you do something wrong or you make a mistake, you know, to do with finances, because how the hell are my kids going to learn if I don't tell them anything? And I don't certainly don't want to be one of these families because you do see it a lot where either the w the partner, the woman or the the man or whatever, they don't know what's going on with their finances, and then it's a big surprise when something goes wrong. So in our situation, there's no surprises, everybody knows what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 9:39

What was the biggest lesson you've learned?

SPEAKER_01 9:42

I think the biggest lesson is never to be overconfident. You know, when things are going really well is you've got to be prepared for when you've got to be resilient and be prepared for when things go wrong. And so for me that was learning to deal with investments potentially that didn't come off in the way I th I planned.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

Did you lose money?

SPEAKER_01 10:12

Yep, absolutely. Significant amounts of money. So like I I was at the age of 40 I had sort of semi-retired and I was just managing my investments. So the main thing that I did wrong was I had a perfect job really in terms of as an investment investment and finance lecturer at IPC part-time. So but what I wanted to do is I had this idea in my head that when I was 40, I wanted to manage my investments full-time. Because I could see that I could make quite a bit of money doing it based on daytime trading? Not they no, no, not daytime trading. I was more a long-term investor, but the error I made was I because my foundation wasn't strong enough, and because I didn't have a salary, I had to sell my investments to pay for my household

Overconfidence And A Costly Loss

SPEAKER_01 11:05

costs, like my mortgage. And that was not a good situation to be in. So I ended up spending using my capital, my investment money, to pay for household costs. So greater patience would have been ideal. So I just probably did that a bit quickly.

SPEAKER_02 11:23

I mean Did you have any good mentors in life?

SPEAKER_01 11:26

And and that's the other thing. Now I do, right? I've got some really, really good mentors, but back then I was very introspective and I was trying to do everything by myself. And that was and that's not the way to do it, and that's why I'm saying go and talk to if you're interested in investing or property investing, don't do it alone. You you need to go and talk to people that have done it or advisors, just and if you don't if you don't get the right person, you've got to keep keep looking for those people that are gonna add to your knowledge so that you can you know add value to what you're doing. It's you want to learn from other people's mistakes. This is the key thing. You want to learn from other people's mistakes. You don't want to you don't want to learn from your own mistakes because they are very, very expensive. Like if I think of my own investment mistakes, it probably cost me five years of investment income and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

SPEAKER_02 12:23

I was about to say, do we want to put a dollar value to that?

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Yeah, I would say it would be close to half a million. Yeah. I would say.

SPEAKER_02 12:30

That's a very expensive mistake, yep.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

Yep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:33

But the good thing is, you're still young.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:36

On your way to recovery.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

Well, I feel better than what I ever have because to be I can look back at that and go, look, if I didn't make that mistake then, I would have made it at a later period. It would have just the problem would have just got worse and worse because the the mistake I was making was that I was overconfident. All right. And then once you start making money in an area and you get lucky a couple of times, you think, oh, I'm pretty good at this. And then you do bigger and bigger investments. And then if those investments go, if you think of a property developer, right? And they start off and the one property development goes alright, maybe they made a hundred thousand dollars. Next thing you know, they're doing a two million dollar property development and they they're trying to make half a mil. But then that might work, and then they might go to a ten million dollar one, that one goes pear-shaped, yeah. And then they lose everything.

SPEAKER_02 13:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

And it's very similar with investing in the market.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

So you know what I love about people that have made their own money is they know how to make money and they know how to bounce back. And I feel like you've experienced that. You you sort of got yourself to a point where you're like, cool, I was managing good money, da-da-da. Got overconfident, that's my mistake, got knocked off the horse. But because you knew how to make money, you got back on the horse.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:57

And you decided to be a bit more careful and a bit more knowledgeable and actually talk to other people and grow grow your brain. Yeah. Grow your brain cells. But what really, really excites me about you right now is that you've managed to save your marriage through that. Because a lot of marriages actually fall apart. Absolutely. When when especially one person is in charge of finances, for instance, and you were in that role.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 14:23

And then you made this massive mistake that cost a lot of money, you know, Rebecca could have left you.

SPEAKER_01 14:28

Oh, absolutely. And the great thing was is that she was really aware of what was going on.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

Maybe that was the key because she was aware of what was going on.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

And I was I kept them up up to date. I mean, I didn't I didn't really want to tell my kids about that because you want to keep yourself at a high level with your children, right? Um, but it's and it's the same with the issues to do with our, you know, we've bought a house, and that house is it's a pretty good house. It's structurally sound and everything, but we've got a few things to fix on it. So that's gonna cost us, you know, some money to to fix that up. And that's but that's good for our kids to see. You need, you know, when you're buying a house, you've got to be really careful because it's a huge investment.

SPEAKER_02 15:11

But also, you know, I think it's good for them to see that life doesn't go just in one line, it actually zigzags all over the place. It can be up, it can be down. You know, you can find yourself in all sorts of places, and it's how you come out of it and what sort of human you become after that as well. Are you able to preserve your true nature of being a good human, compassionate and kind and loving despite all the crap that's been thrown at you? Or do you come out bitter and angry and just blaming the world and willing to just sit in the corner, you know, with your arms sort of folded and going, oh, it wasn't my fault, it was everyone else's fault, you know. Now I'm gonna hate on everyone.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Well, I think that's the key is you've got to own it and say this is this is something that I did wrong and and you can't go around blaming other people. I mean, I it really came home to me when I spent a year working at, and this is no issue with Massa University, but I spent a job in a I spent a year in a in a job, you know, in a earning a salary at in a bureaucracy like Massy University, and you know, I had really cool people that I was working

Mentors Recovery And Mortgage Advising

SPEAKER_01 16:20

with, but it's the systems right the work I just didn't want to go. It wasn't something I bounced out of bed in the morning, I wasn't excited about doing it at all, and in fact I felt a little bit made me feel a little bit ill, but I knew that's what I had to do to it was a temporary fix, a temporary problem. If I had stuck and I had lots of opportunities there to carry on, and I could have carried on because they pay quite good salaries at these places, but it just wasn't me. I didn't want to be that person that stayed in a place like that 10-20 years. I would not be happy. It didn't make your soul happy, no, but I got the opportunity to do the mortgage advising, well, that with yourself, it wasn't the original plan, if you remember, but um, but that has been awesome since I've been doing that, and we're getting out and talking to people in the wealth-related industry. It's such an interesting I'm not saying it's for everybody, people got to find their own industry, right? What what makes them passionate? Yeah, and that's what you've got to keep trying to do, even though you're not enjoying this moment, you've got to try and find that thing, eh, that you really like doing.

SPEAKER_02 17:31

What do you read? What sort of book that changed your life that you you think you can recommend to others?

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Well, I would love to recommend uh Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger, and that's a collection of speeches. Charlie Munger, if you're outside of investment circles, you wouldn't have heard of him, but he was Warren Buffett's longtime business partner for about 40, 45 years. And he was a key part of Warren Buffett's success with his investment vehicle, Berkshire Hathaway, uh, which is probably the most successful investment business ever. And anyway, he did a series of speeches in the 90s at places like Harvard and other business schools, not just about investing, but about psychology and about how we make decisions. So I would thoroughly, if you can't read the whole book, read the speech on the psychology of human misjudgment. It's about 20 pages long. The psychology of human misjudgments. He goes through a list of about 22 things, specific areas where we we have in us these fundamental flaws about our decision making. It's really, really interesting. And you'd love it, actually.

SPEAKER_02 18:49

Uh, because I'm into the whole psychology.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Yeah, it is really cool. It explains a lot about why we do the things we do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:57

Um I mean we are emotional creatures as well. Often we make we do things that don't even make sense. Yep. But are you happy now? Are you happy where you are?

SPEAKER_01 19:05

Oh man, I'm super excited. There's so many interesting things going on every day, you know. You know, last night I was at uh at Open Star Technologies, which is like a a s it's a I couldn't even explain it, but they're doing something with fusion energy. This is in in the Hutt Valley. It's uh and they uh they're doing fundraising, they're not listed yet, but it's a very we got to go around their uh plant. It was really exciting seeing that, and I'm getting to talk with people about their finances, helping them set their goals, or mainly finding out what their goals are and helping them achieve their goals. I'm getting to talk to a lot of older people, doing face-to-faces, trying to help them with you know, getting having them having the lifestyle they want to enjoy their later years. Uh, there's a lot of interesting things. I'm sponsoring a cycling team. Well, uh well, I'm looking at sponsoring a cycling team, and and I'm doing cycling again, so yeah, it's cool.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

You know, when I look at you, James, what I think about what comes to mind for you as everything you've done led you to this moment. Because you needed to leave that life, you needed to become a lecturer first, you know, to and this is where you get all your compassionate skills and passionate about you know money subjects and what to do with that, but at the same time being that teacher where you're quite patient and you can explain things in very plain English to people. And I think those skills serve the you know, if we're looking about the blocks that build you, or who is James, I feel like that was a massive part. You needed to get through that. Then you also needed, you know, to experience that big loss and what you had, because then that makes you empathetic to those that you're dealing with. That a lot of our clients could be mid-age, they could be the ones nearing retirement and they feel like they haven't achieved much in life because they've also suffered through bad marriages or bad business decisions or whatever. And because you've experienced that big loss yourself, you can actually connect with them on that level as well. And then you sort of went through a stage with your parents where unfortunately you lost your mom last year and she went through a lot of illnesses, and you're dad right now in a stage where you're sort of looking at how you you're helping him out and his circle of friends and what's happening there. And I think that again made you

Decision Psychology And Reading Tips

SPEAKER_02 21:30

more empathetic towards older people and understanding them much better of what's important to them in those latter years.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Yeah, it's really interesting and how they really value that face-to-face, uh, those relationships. It's uh it's that, and what I am getting understanding is those people in their middle age as well, and the demands that are on people in their middle age who've got teenagers, and I know this is a Western sort of problem, but teenagers as well as aging parents. So you're managing these urine sort of charge.

SPEAKER_02 22:04

I call it a sandwich caregiving.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

It's it's quite interesting. You've got a lot of you can see why people are. Pretty stressed out there and burnt out.

SPEAKER_02 22:12

And um, because you you know, if especially if you're working nine to five type of job, you know, where you have to be in the office, you can't just take off and attend various appointments. Versus here, I think we're quite fortunate where we can have a very flexible working arrangement that we can go and attend all sorts of different appointments with our children, our parents, yeah, and still be available for our clients.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

I think that's a really exciting part. I mean, that's what I like is that having that flexibility because you you you plan your schedule, right? You do more hours than what you would ever do in the well in the salary job, but it's productive hours, it's all at you know, it's fitting into your schedule when I work best, which is in the morning and after nap time because I'm getting old after nap time, but I find that I can work quite late at at night, which is when our clients often want to talk.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

But also I think it is important to address as well that you did have that long COVID, it did affect you as well. And I think again, a lot of people, you know, don't like talking about those things.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

It is hard. I mean, I I don't like telling people, I mean, um that I have a nap, but because people judge you, but it's just it means I can get two lots of two it's like I can get two shifts in a day, but I lose yeah, like I think about 10% of people got uh impacted by long COVID that got COVID and a lot of people have it much worse than me, but I my brain it just it's affected my brain somehow, and I can't hold concentration like I used to be able to, and working on a computer, I get uh the screens and

Long COVID Flex Work And Perspective

SPEAKER_01 23:50

the lights from cars, so driving at night like is not great, but you what you do learn is that everybody's got some kind of health issue, and we're all dealing with something that's not quite right, so it's quite normal in that regard.

SPEAKER_02 24:04

See, I love talking about these things because I feel like as a society we don't. I feel like everyone lives right now in this Instagram world where everything is just so perfect, you know, we're looking at someone's photos or reels and stories, and it looks like they're having this magnificent life while poor are suffering and you know, maybe having issues like long COVID or whatever. But in reality, as you said, everybody has something that they're going through. And I think this is what we really need to remind ourselves and our listeners, and just in our everyday lives, is that you just never know who you're talking to and what they're going through. Because on the surface, we may look like we're all well put together.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Yeah. But in reality, we may not. We're a mess. It's like uh you just it's going from issue to issue sometimes, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 24:53

It's like and then But it's how you cope with that, how do you manage with that, and what do you do out of it, you know? Like for instance, you found out if you have a nap, you're a much better human.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

I am. It is so good to wake up from that and go, you actually get your enthusiasm back, and the things that were stressing you out pre prior to that, suddenly it's not an issue anymore. You know, you're feeling positive about it rather than it being an obstacle. So just having that two two injections of energy a day is pretty cool, and it allows me to do my bike ride, which is which is quite cool. Yeah, but I didn't do a bike ride every day, maybe three or four times a week or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 25:31

But that's cool. So you've got big goals now.

SPEAKER_01 25:33

Oh, absolutely, yeah, and they're all very achievable.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

Awesome, James. I am so so so proud to have you on the team, and I couldn't have picked a better man to be in this chair today. So thank you so much for coming along and sharing openly about your story because it's not comfortable often to open up about your your values and what made you who you are, and share things like you know, yeah, I did steal some money from my siblings. Yeah, you sound like you know, often we compared you, I think, to my child number three, because I think he does something like that as well, where he raids all his siblings.

SPEAKER_01 26:12

It was so available, you know, it's just sitting there in their little drawers, and I'm like, hey, I'm seven years old. Yeah, that they're not gonna notice it, and they're all they're always very generous and good to me anyway. Do you know what I mean? It wasn't like they were mean to me, luckily.

SPEAKER_02 26:25

So I totally see it. And it's funny because I can see it in my kids as well when they do things like that, and I can tell what they're probably gonna become in the future. It's not like they're gonna be thieves, it's just part of that natural development and learning do's and don'ts, because this is the age to learn. You don't want to be doing that when you're like, no, that's right. And yeah, that's right, yeah. Doing it at three, five, seven is actually behaviourally that's where it should be happening. So, yeah. So thank you so much for coming along and sharing your story. And I would love to have Rebecca here to share herself.

SPEAKER_01 26:57

She should uh give her side of the uh equation uh part two, maybe.

SPEAKER_02 27:02

Exactly. Thank you so much, James.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

No worries, even e so.