My story

I spent my twenties broke, and I earned decent enough money the whole time.

Five years of study finished, a decent salary, and I thought the point of money was to spend it. Eating out five nights a week. Travel. Weekends out. All the ordinary trappings of a single person in their twenties with no-one to answer to.

By my late twenties I had no savings and I wasn't even in KiwiSaver. With a $25,000 student loan against my name, I had less money at twenty-five than I'd had the day I was born.

Some of the specifics still make me wince. Around $1,600 a month on food and eating out (that equates to around $2,800 a month in 2026 dollars). $400 a month on CDs - remember those. Another $400 on alcohol. Two thousand dollars a month (almost $3,500 in 2026 dollars), gone, on things I couldn't tell you a single detail about now.

The thing that changed it

In early 2015 I hurt my back running. I was thirty-four.

It was bad enough that I could barely walk. I was off work for months, some of it unpaid, and after a couple of months with no income I was back to where I'd started with nothing behind me.

Lying there unable to move, the thought that arrived wasn't about money exactly. It was that I couldn't do this until I was seventy. And that if my body gave out before then, I had no plan at all.

So I started reading. Books, blogs, anything about personal finance and early retirement, and I was astonished at how much of it there was. A whole community of people who had retired in their fifties, forties, some in their thirties. Pete at Mr Money Mustache was the one that landed.

I had assumed working until sixty-five was simply what happened. Finding out it wasn't was the single most useful thing I've learned about money.

I cut my spending, ran the numbers, and worked out that with some changes I could stop working before I turned fifty. Then I wrote the plan down, and having it in writing changed everything. My money suddenly had a purpose, and so did the rest of it.

What happened to that plan

I'm in my mid-forties now. I'm not retiring at fifty.

Life arrived in between. I got married. We had two children. We built a house, which means I have a mortgage again after years of not having one. I left corporate work and started this business.

And somewhere in there my wife and I made a deliberate decision: we scaled back. Less work, less income, a slower path. Because our kids are young once, and the years where they actually want your company are not long. We'd rather have that time now than a slightly earlier finish line later.

That's not the plan failing. That's the plan doing its job.

A blueprint isn't a promise, it's a starting position. The value was never in hitting fifty exactly. It was in knowing what the trade-offs were, so that when we chose time with our children over a faster route to retirement, we knew precisely what we were choosing and what it cost. Most people make that decision without ever seeing the numbers, and then wonder later how they ended up where they are.

I'd have made the same choice either way. But I made it with my eyes open, and that is entirely down to having sat down years earlier and worked out what mattered.

It also means I'm around. I'm treasurer of the school PTA and I turn up as a reading helper, which is not a financial credential and isn't meant to be, it's just what scaling back was for.

Why I do this

Every mistake I list above, I made myself. That's most of why I'm useful.

I know what it's like to have nothing behind you at thirty. I know what a few months without income feels like when there's no buffer. I know how easy it is to spend two thousand dollars a month and have nothing to show for it, and how quietly that becomes a decade.

I also know what it's like on the other side of it, and how much of the distance between the two came down to a handful of decisions rather than earning more.

So Your Money Blueprint exists to help people get that clarity earlier than I did, and without the injury.

The calculators are part of that. Over a hundred of them, free, because I built them for my own finances first and couldn't find New Zealand versions that did the job. The blog is the rest.

What I'd want you to know

I don't sell products. I have no affiliation with any provider, I don't earn commission, and there's nothing I'm quietly steering you toward. When I tell you a reverse mortgage is expensive, or that your KiwiSaver fund is fine as it is, there's no version of that conversation where I'm better off for saying something else.

I'm based in Whangarei and I work with people all over New Zealand.

I've also been a private landlord for over a decade. So when someone asks whether a rental stacks up, they're asking someone who has actually done it - paid the rates, dealt with the tenants, and found out which of the numbers on the spreadsheet turn out to be optimistic.

If any of that sounds familiar

If you'd like to talk through where you are and where you'd like to get to, get in touch for a free 30 minute chat. No obligation, and no sales pitch. It's a conversation to work out whether I'd be useful to you.