What is a money blueprint?

A blueprint is the plan you're working to with your money. Where it goes, what it's for, and what you're expecting it to have done by the time you need it.

Here's the part people miss: you already have one. Whether you sat down and designed it, or absorbed it without noticing, you're following something.

Most of us inherited ours

If you grew up in a household where money was tight, you may have arrived at adulthood believing there's never quite enough and never quite will be. If you grew up watching money spent as fast as it came in, that's probably your default too.

Neither of those was a decision. They were absorbed, and they run quietly underneath everything else.

The most common inherited blueprint in New Zealand goes something like: school, some training, forty years of work, then retirement on whatever's accumulated by then, plus NZ Super, and hope it's enough. Live near enough to payday to payday in the meantime. Assume it'll probably work out.

That's a plan. It's just not one anybody chose.

Mine was wrong for twenty years

I spent my twenties earning well and saving nothing, because my blueprint said money was for spending and retirement was something that happened at sixty-five.

It took hurting my back at thirty-four, months off work, and stumbling across people who'd retired decades early, to work out that the thing I'd assumed was a given was just an assumption. The whole story is here. It's not flattering, but it's the reason I do this.

The realisation wasn't complicated. It was arithmetic, and then a decision. But I'd gone two decades without doing either.

Yours won't look like mine

This is the part that matters, and it's why the site is called what it is.

What one person wants from their money is not what the next person wants. Some people want to stop working as early as possible. Some like their work and want to keep doing it, but with less pressure. Some want to move somewhere cheaper, or go part-time while the children are small, or help a family member, or simply stop lying awake about it.

Those are different destinations, and they need different plans. A rule of thumb built for someone else's life will get you someone else's outcome.

There is no single right answer. There's only the one that fits what you actually want, which means the first useful question isn't "what should I do with my money" but "what am I trying to buy with it".

And it will change

Every blueprint meets roadblocks and detours. Life happens.

Mine did. I built a plan in my thirties to stop working by fifty, and then got married, had two children and deliberately scaled back instead. Trading the earlier finish line for time while they're young.

That isn't the plan failing. A blueprint isn't a promise, it's a starting position. Its value is that when your circumstances change, you can see exactly what you're trading and choose deliberately. Most people make that decision without ever seeing the numbers, and wonder later how they ended up where they are.

Why bother with an adviser?

Most New Zealanders never speak to one. Partly cost, partly the assumption that advisers are for wealthy people, and partly a national habit of assuming it'll be right.

I'm not going to list twenty reasons. There are five situations where I'd say it's worth an hour of someone's time, and you'll know if one of them is you.

You've been meaning to sort it out for three years. Not because you're lazy, but because it's the kind of task with no deadline, so it never becomes today's problem. An appointment gives it one.

You don't know if you're on track, and you don't know how you'd find out. This is the most common one. The uncertainty is often worse than the answer, and the answer usually only takes about a few hours to establish.

You and your partner disagree, and you've stopped getting anywhere. One saver, one spender; or two savers with different ideas about what for. A third person with no stake in who's right changes that conversation more than people expect.

There's enough at stake (or enough complexity) that small differences matter. When your assets are modest, most decisions don't move the needle much. Past a certain point they do. The wrong investment fund, the wrong KiwiSaver, the wrong mortgage strategy, can all cost significantly more than the cost of one off financial advice. Or maybe your situation has many moving parts and is quite complex. A financial adviser can help unmuddy the waters.

You're about to make a decision you can't reverse. Buying, selling, retiring, having kids, taking time off work, taking redundancy, moving countries. The cost of getting those wrong is measured in years, and they're the cheapest possible thing to get a second opinion on.

If none of those describe you, the calculators are free and there's a fair chance you don't need me.

Working out yours

If you'd like help building a blueprint that's actually yours, or checking whether the one you're following still fits, 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.