SortMe Money
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.
Episodes
29 episodes
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 thi...
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 h...
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 ...
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?...
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 w...
KiwiSaver employer contributions in 2026: the new 3.5% minimum, explained
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,...
Mortgage refix or refinance? Your options when your fixed rate ends
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 y...
Inflation 101: what it is, and how to stop it quietly eating your savings
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 ren...
How to budget a side hustle in NZ (with multiple income streams)
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 secon...
Your default savings account is leaking money: where to park your money in NZ in 2026
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 page...
Budgeting tools that work for self-employed people (NZ)
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% ...
Introducing Entity Management: your trust, your rental, your side business all in SortMe
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 differ...
Should I be using a trust? When a family trust is the right move?
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 b...
When to see a financial advisor in NZ (and when it's still too early)
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...
The SortMe Cashflow Health Score: what it is and how it's calculated
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 wha...
What lifestyle creep is - and why it's so hard to spot
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"....
Sharesies, Hatch, Kernel: where each one fits in an NZ portfolio
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 ...
Joint or separate? How dual-income NZ households really run their money in 2026
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 tw...
Budgeting v3 is live. Your essentials and your lifestyle now live apart
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 d...
NZ House Sales Steadied in March — Why First-Home Buyers Still Have the Upper Hand
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...
PocketSmith alternatives in NZ (and when SortMe is the better fit)
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...
The NZ net worth tracker for households with more than a bank account
Working out your real net worth sounds simple — add up what you own, subtract what you owe. The catch is that for most NZ households, no one actually sits down to do it until something forces the question: tax time, a mortgage application, or a...
When to switch KiwiSaver providers (and what SortMe flags first)
If you're searching "switch KiwiSaver", the question underneath is almost always one of two: should I? or how do I? The second one is easy — the transfer takes ten minutes online and a few business days in the background. The ...
Break your fix? What a NZ mortgage break fee really costs
If you're searching "mortgage break fee NZ", you're really asking one question: is it worth paying the fee to get a lower rate now? The honest answer is "it depends on three numbers, and most households don't have them in front of them when the...
Petrol just jumped 20% in a month — do you know what that's actually costing your household?
91 octane in Auckland sat at $2.50 a litre at the start of March. Six weeks later it's $3.04 — a 20% jump on a non-discretionary line item with no warning, and economists are openly discussing $4 a litre as a realistic scenario if Middle East t...