Mimi in Wellington with hubby and 3 kids

About MoneySecrets: MoneySecrets offers a peek into the financial lives of our fellow Kiwis. The story below was written using pseudonyms to remain anonymous. When commenting, please remember that the writer has laid bare their financial life, which can be a scary thing to do. Please be kind, and enjoy!

INTRODUCTION

Kia ora! I’m Mimi 42, my husband is Bash, 39. We both live in Wellington. I work as a Civil Servant and Bash works with an Engineering Consultancy. We have three children - one aged 6.5, and 5 year old twins.

I'm actually a bit teary reviewing what I've written here, and seeing how far I have come compared to when I left West Africa 14 years ago. If only I knew what I know now, I could have uplifted and supported a lot more members of my family many times over. Anyho -

I was born and raised in West Africa. My father and mother both worked. We weren’t poor. We were not flush with money either. The ‘it takes a village’ mantra is a very strong anchor in my culture, so although my father had only 5 of us, I grew up as one of 17 children living under one roof. These included close and distant cousins. Being the eldest child, my parents drilled into me (and by extension the rest of us), the importance of education, and subsequently, money. The message was that education is required to get very good jobs, which in turn would allow me to marry well, support my family, and care for my extended relations.

I started supporting my family when I turned 23 and got my first job. There was no social welfare, free education, free healthcare, or similar programs in those days. Now there’s a pension scheme, and some sort of subsidised healthcare.

My father retired and the mantle fell on me. Unlike my father, I had a strong sense of self preservation, so I cut back a lot on the extended family support whilst supporting my immediate family. I bought my first home at 25 through the whole family’s effort, left for the UK to study for a masters degree and yes, you guessed it, every single member of my family contributed to gathering the almost $19k that was required.

I had every intention of returning home after my studies, however fate had different plans. My long term relationship ended, and with it, the majority of my respectability. I had the choice to either head back home and suffer the indignities of being an old maid (I was 28) or remain in the UK and try to raise my family’s economic power.

I threw myself into work (and consequently debt). I worked to send money home and diligently sent over 60% of my wages home every month. I lived in a house-share with very minimal bills. Within 2 years, my 2 middle siblings were in university in the UK with me footing the majority of their fees.

That was when I met Bash. He is the complete opposite of me. From an affluent family, had savings, was still living at home with very few bills to pay, a mum who had never worked and a dad who worked all hours. When we moved in together 10 years ago, I had debts of about $45k (mainly uni fees put on a credit card) and held down 2 jobs which meant I was working 18 hour days, 6 days a week. The big lightbulb moment came when we wanted to buy a house. The bank would only lend us enough that would enable us to buy a mini wreck in a dodgy area. Bash had $50k in savings. I had nada, zilch, and $45k worth of debt.

I did the unthinkable. I sold the house back in Africa without consulting with my family. It had substantially appreciated in value. In today’s money, I bought it for $8k and sold it for $84k five years later. I was able to pay off all my debts, pay off the remainder of my siblings’ fees, and paid that year’s school fees of one child from each of my aunts and uncles and considered it my immediate debts paid. It’s a debt I continue to pay, but at my own pace and choosing.

Bash on the other hand has no such issues. His money is his money and he doesn’t even consider helping out his siblings. They most likely would be offended should he try! He does look up to his father though and is very driven in trying to be as successful as he is. I have had to put the brakes on a few times by reminding him that he can forge his own path. My mother-in-law once told me that my father-in-law had never, ever attended any school event or done dropoffs or pickups, or was ever home for family meals because he worked very long hours. That’s not my vision for family life, and luckily neither is it his.

For him, it’s work, work, work and save, save, save. Because we have now bought and sold properties twice and made good profits both times, I strongly feel we need a 2nd source of income that can tick away nicely in the background. We both really love and enjoy our jobs, so packing that in is not an option. Plus I have one more sibling left to see through university - she is in her final year of an Engineering degree. Hallelujah!

Ideally we would love to buy another property in the UK using equity from our current home so that we have 2 rentals there, and buy a 2 or 3 bedroom property here in New Zealand near the coast to use specifically for swaps and ease of travel.

Our long term plans include leaving New Zealand in 5 years’ time for 8 to 9 years and then returning (maybe we won’t who knows).

I have read a lot of financial freedom books but honestly no approach appeals to me as a realistic approach, and maybe I’m looking at it wrongly. My instincts say to stick with what we know works well. Whoever created land in the first place is not creating more, so buy a few and hold one or 2. Then sell and free up the cash as needed.

FINANCIAL GOALS

Our biggest extravagance is travel, and it is one we’re not willing to curb drastically.

Our ideal is to be able to leave NZ for at least 12 weeks every year - this would entail taking unpaid leave, so our finances would need to be in a position to handle it.

Another important point is that we do not want our children attending secondary school in New Zealand. I know that NZ performs very badly for secondary school education among the OECD countries in particular, and is usually ranked lower than a lot of developing countries. Having a good grounding and foundation in education is important to us. Experience tells me that secondary qualification is the deal breaker. Having been an economic migrant twice, I know that a good university qualification is important to enable our children to move freely as economic migrants should they choose. We want to give them that good grounding and foundation, so we will need to be in another country for those years.

I’ll be almost 50 and Bash in his mid 40s by that point. We don’t feel those ages are the right time to start new jobs in new countries. Therefore I keep being drawn to the BRRR property strategy - Buy, Renovate, Refinance and Repeat. We (I mostly) have tackled 2 big renovation projects and I have been shadowing (for want of a better word) a female property investor who has been doing the same here. Only we won’t hold the properties, we would sell and reinvest the money every time, diversifying the profits a bit.

Assets

• Renovating: The very first extension and renovation was a huge learning curve! I learnt a little bit about every aspect of property renovation, squared up to tradesmen - the sexism OMG!, and managed to not divorce anyone haha. The project overran the timeframe and we overspent. For the 2nd one, I was a lot more savvy, I included a completion bonus if the renovation was finished before schedule and it was bang on the money with no overspends. It was 2 weeks early and we finished with $300 left in the pot!!! I learnt a lot more than the first time, even though I had 3 young children underfoot. I got to grips with the financial side of things as well. It turned out Bash was very good at the spreadsheet side of things. He kept my spending in check, and I learnt to negotiate hard to get good quality items at a reasonable rate. I like seeing the finished product at the end. The unveiling. It’s always a very proud moment for me.

• Property: Our current property is located in the UK. We bought our first home the year we got married. We were going to buy a small 2 bed starter home. My father-in-law gifted us $80k, which meant we could buy a much larger home, so we bought a 3 bedroom doer upper. We spent about $100k on it and converted it to a 5 bedroom home. Then sold it due to a work move from the West of the UK to London, and bought another 5 bedroom doer-upper in the east of the UK. We again spent around $100k doing it up and a few weeks later (literally) upped sticks and moved to New Zealand. It seems whenever we buy a house, a major location move comes along! We do love the process of converting a run down house into a beautiful home! It is both very stressful and satisfying!

• Cash: We try to always have enough money to get out of NZ should we need to leave in an emergency. We aim to keep it at $20k. We go through cycles of spending and replacing it. For example, as at Feb 2020, it stood at $300 because we spent the majority of it on a private surgery for me. We built it back to $20k by August 2020.

• Kiwisaver: We arrived in NZ on work visas, so did not qualify for Kiwisaver until January 2019. We immediately started contributing. Especially as we know it can be taken with us should we decide to leave NZ in the future. I will not qualify for a UK pension, as I'd need to pay at least 35 years of national insurance payments and I've paid only 11! We therefore need some sort of pension, and this seems a good start. I have $8k in my Kiwisaver, and Bash about $15k. They're both with Generate - 50% in Growth and 50% in Conservative funds.

• Shares: Held in the UK. We used the cash gifts we got from our wedding 10 years ago to buy medium risk shares. We were gifted about $22k-ish. I am from a culture where cash gifts are given to a new couple. We withdrew $18k in 2015 to pay for our final round of IVF and the remainder is ticking along nicely.

• Vehicles: We always used to buy cars about 3 years old and use them for a while. However when we moved to NZ, we bought a much older car (12 years old) with low mileage. Work necessitated buying another car so we bought a Ford that was 3 years old and had a low mileage - under 60,000kms for $18k (I'm seeing a pattern here of how we burn through our vex money!) It's now our only car since moving to Wellington. We're currently tempted to sell it and just hire a car for when we travel, but can't seem to bring ourselves to that point. Since moving to Wellington, we drive a lot less than we ever have. I haven't driven in over 3 months, and Bash only takes the car out to go shopping on Sundays. Seems a waste!

Debt

• Mortgage: As our property is in the UK, the interest rate is very low. We're currently on 1.65% until next September. It's a repayment mortgage, so we're paying off the principal as well as the interest. In 2013, Bash accepted a job offer in London, which although paid more, essentially left us with a lot less money due to high rental and transport costs. He needed the job in the private sector to launch his career. So we rented out our forever home that we'd slavishly and painstakingly updated over the course of 12 months to enable us to move to just outside London. I was pregnant from our first successful round of IVF, so we needed at least a 3 bedroom home. I spent the majority of that year on maternity leave. We then decided to try for a final round of IVF - we were not expecting it to be successful as we'd had so many losses. To our utter shock, not only was it successful, we ended up with twins. It meant a move out of the London area. The commute was not too bad - 90 minutes each way, but the company culture was not family friendly at all. Long hours and weekend work above standard hours was expected. This pregnancy turned out to be more high risk, and by 14 weeks pregnant I was signed off work onto statutory sick pay which is peanuts. We potentially would have 3 children under 18 months! After a bit of job hunting, Bash got a job offer in the east of England. So again we moved, me 20 weeks pregnant, to a town just outside Norwich. We decided to sell the "forever home" that was being rented out and buy a semi rural forever home where we lived after I went back to work. We put an offer on a lovely house which was accepted in March 2017, sold our previous home and bang! Bash got offered a work transfer to New Zealand. We thought about it for all of 24 hours before deciding yes, let's do this! We pulled out of that purchase and bought a doer upper in a commuter town, moved out of our rental into my cousin's tiny 2 bedroom house 4 hours away, and I resigned. I project managed the renovation whilst sorting out our visas and preparing our stuff to be shipped to NZ. The renovation was completed a week after we arrived in New Zealand! The rental market is so crazy at the moment that we’re not worried about the mortgage at all. We’re planning to remortgage into a Buy-To-Let product which would put us on interest-only. We will always overpay every year.

• Credit cards: Although we put all our monthly spend on the credit card, it gets paid off in full every month so we don't pay interest on it.

• Student loan: I was an international student and paid my fees upfront to be allowed a visa. Bash’s parents paid his tution fees, so he graduated without a student loan.

• Other: There's a 0% interest rate on this loan. When we left the UK, we put the house on Airbnb for a while whilst we decided what to do - i.e. if we would remain in NZ. So we took a personal loan from a family member to furnish the house for the Airbnb market. As it is a 5 bedroom, 2 bathroom house, it needed lots of furniture! The loan was for $35k and we're on track to finish paying it off in 2 years. We were going to leave our furniture behind and buy here in New Zealand, but a quick glance on the various expat/immigration forums showed us that was a crazy idea! Plus we needed to be a bit more minimalist in furnishing an Airbnb rental.

Income

Bash had a 10% pay cut for 6 months due to COVID. That was very, very worrying as we weren’t sure it'd go back to full pay. From the end of this month, he’ll be back to full pay. Being a civil servant, I know my job is fairly secure, plus I work in a much needed compliance role with not enough staff as it is, so I’m not anticipating any job or wage cuts.

• Salaries: Bash works for a global consultancy and negotiated a wage increase as part of the move to NZ. He effectively doubled his wage with the move, which is crazy considering he's moved with the same company in the same role, although has been promoted since being in NZ. He earns $140k. I work for a government agency and earn $87k. The budget for the move was based on a joint income of $140k. My first job in Auckland had a starting wage of $66k. It was a stressful job in the private education sector with a long commute. After a car crash in mid 2019, I decided I'd had enough and resigned. I used to leave the house at 5.30am and return around 5pm daily, and still catch up on work at home. I was unemployed for a couple of months, and after some toing and froing, we decided to up sticks and move out of Auckland. It was predicated on me getting a job. I started applying for jobs in Wellington, and was lucky to get two offers. I decided to remain in the education sector but also wanted to come off the rat race a bit, so took the government role. The bonus is that it pays more and I can work flexibly. It does not present me with as many opportunities for career growth, however I would like to focus on spending more time with the children now they're older and more interesting haha.

• Interest income: Although we have $20k in savings, the interest is very negligible. Looking at 2019, it was about $70 for the whole year! Shameful!

• Rental income: After 12 months of hosting Airbnb guests, which was by the way the most stressful venture ever, we decided to remain in NZ, so rented out the home long term. The rent covers the mortgage (full repayment), tax, and management fees, and leaves us with about $560 spare every month. This goes into a sinking fund which covers the loan repayment to our family member and any repairs for the house. We have not done any repairs since the renovation 3 years ago. We know for a fact that when the tenant leaves in 2021, we will need to spend some money sprucing it up before reletting it again.

• Other income: I mark English language exams for an international examination body. This money is not consistent. The minimum I can earn is $6,000 per annum for 2 lots of examination marking in June and November. In 2020 the June exams were cancelled due to COVID, and the next exams are not set in stone yet.

Expenses

Our biggest worry and cost is childcare. Without it, we can’t work. With an au pair, we always had someone on standby to pick up a child, stay at home with them when ill, and to babysit. With our au pair gone and the borders closed, we've recently found a local woman to help. Touchwood - we’ve not had any sick days yet. I worry about being let down by woman helping us, especially as she has a family of her own. If we have to go the nanny route, it’ll double our childcare expenses. We will be able to afford it, but it will likely put us back on living paycheck to paycheck. Having 3 children means it will always be cheaper to have one person look after them than pay 3 lots of before and after school costs. I am watching the border with a vested interest.

• Housing: Although many people look down on renting, we quite like it. It enables us to live where we want, and doesn’t tie us to a permanent location. We also do not consider rent as dead money. It’s money spent for a roof over our heads. So although rent is our biggest expense, it’s a flexible expense which we are in control of. We are very chuffed to have reduced our weekly rent from $980 a week to $795 a week for the same calibre of house by virtue of moving cities! We're saving $9,620 per annum. We refuse to compromise on house quality, so we rent an insulated, heated, and well-maintained 4 bedroom house in the outskirts of Wellington. We are fairly central, being a 5 min walk to the major train station, 10 minutes walk from the children's school, and 10 minutes walk from the centre with all the needed facilities. It's fairly obvious now that we were living from paycheck to paycheck in Auckland, but since we had no unmanageable debt we were able to just about tread water. We do not want to buy our own home which shocks all our friends. For one, we will not be able to afford a deposit on the kind of house we will want to buy. Something similar nearby sold for $1.6m 2 weeks ago!!!! That's a minimum deposit of $160k. No way! Eek!!! However, we can comfortably rent in the precise location that we want. The biggest issue with renting is the lack of protection for tenants in a volatile market like the current one - most landlords will probably disagree with this but having rented and owned abroad, tenants currently draw the short end of the stick here. I for one would be very happy with long term fixed tenancies with adequate break periods built in. I'd happily rent this house for a 5 year fixed term, with rental increases built in, and an option for each party to break the rental agreement every 12 months.

• Groceries: Now we have learnt what is in season or not, our food budget has dramatically dropped. We average $400 a week now. We love food and we love good food. We also both love cooking, and it's not a chore so that makes life easy as it means we hardly eat out. Whenever we eat out, we always comment about how we could possibly cook better at home! Because we also like very well seasoned and spicy food, it means we have more leeway to try out different spices in different meals rather than be stuck with the chef's inspiration. We love our meat. We're not heavy drinkers. We buy wine for when we have guests, but most of our wine collection is used for cooking! We tell friends not to bring wine when they visit because it will end up in a pan on the stove! I very much like cider, Bash likes beer, and we both like spirits. We have a friend who is a pilot, and he buys all our spirits from duty free using his staff discount. That keeps us flush with all the alcohol necessary.

• Eating out: This is based on our spending to date this year. We will often have fish and chips takeaway once every 3-4 weeks. Bash has work meetings about once every 3 weeks or so, but he'll have a tea. He used to buy lunch when we were in Auckland, but our end of the year spreadsheet woke him up to the waste. He now takes a packed lunch in. I've always taken a packed lunch to work and when we go out with the kids on weekends. I used to be a skint international student!

• Entertainment: We get Netflix with our mobile subscriptions. We would usually attend one concert or so a year, but none in the last 12 months - the one we booked was cancelled in April. Otherwise this is maybe $250 ish for 2 tickets. We use my sister's Disney Plus account.

• Transport: This is broken down into:

  • Monthly train pass for $142 a month x 12. We share the monthly train pass as we work from home on opposite days for both childcare reasons and for an efficiency of costs.

  • A running 10 journey ticket which we would usually buy twice a month for $84.

  • Insurance - $922. We always have comprehensive insurance. Until this month we had an au pair who also drove the car as needed. They are usually under 25 so higher premiums, but also higher chances of a crash, especially being foreigners not used to NZ-style driving.

  • $63 for Rego, $496 for annual servicing including 2 new tyres this year, $77 for WOF, $1620 for petrol, and $360 for car cleaning. Twice a year, I take the car to be valeted thoroughly. We buy all our cars outright for cash. No finance or loans no matter how expensive the car is.

• Utilities: The biggest chunk of our utilities cost is the house cleaning at a whopping $90 a week, but it brings marital peace and harmony so that bill is definitely a keeper! The cleaner does everything including the inside and outside windows. Internet is $63, mobiles are $88, bins and recycling is $360 per annum, gas and electricity average out to around $400 a month.

• Sport and hobbies: I have always had a gym membership, but over the last 12 months we started buying gym equipment for the house as Bash became quite keen on working out. It's cost us about 3k to fully kit out a home gym including a power rack with all weights and cables. We bought all 2nd hand, and buying new would have cost us close to $7k. So I've given up the gym membership now. It was $25 a week. No other expensive hobbies or sports for us. The children have bicycles but those were purchased with birthday monies from grandparents. We also have 2 kayaks that were purchased with birthday monies from grandparents last year.

• Health: We had a one off surgery cost of $8,000 for reconstructive surgery for me in 2019, so this is not typical of our healthcare costs. A typical annual cost is around the $2,000 mark.

• Shopping: We bought new clothes for Bash this year, as between us both we lost about 40kg in the last 18 months. My sister makes all my clothes then sends them to me at no cost. Oh I also decided to start using period underwear, so spent $200 on a pack of 9. I'm aiming to buy another pack of 9 and give up regular panties. I also have to use panty liners daily thanks to pregnancy related incontinence. I also bought a few new pieces of clothing as I have dropped from size 14 to 8. I took in most of my clothes myself - easy to do as they are mostly A line dresses. My sister is sending a huge shipment of clothes in time for Christmas. For the children, I bulk buy clothes and shoes twice a year. I buy summer clothes at the beginning of the northern hemisphere winter from the UK, and winter clothes at the beginning of northern hemisphere summer from the UK. I spend about $2,000 on the kids’ clothes every year. I don't buy gendered clothes so the girls will often wear hand me downs from their brother. The clothes and shoes are very good quality and still have lots of wear in them when they become too small. Afterwards I often send them to the Women’s Refuge. They are not branded but wear way, way better than whatever we buy from KMart and The Warehouse here. I do have a sewing machine which I use more for mending clothes, and I need to get into making the girls' clothes at least.

• Kids: We have 3 children aged 6.5, 5, and 5 (the twins have just turned 5 so start school next month wahoo!) Childcare alone comes to $19,836 per annum, and that was the cheapest option which was a combination of kindy and an au pair (who we had until Jan this year). We paid our au pair $250 a week, provided him with room and board, and he also had a car for his own use. For that cost, he provided up to 35 hours of childcare, so took care of all pickups, drop offs, taking the kids to activities, keeping them occupied, and doing some light housework to keep the house reasonably tidy. Where it came into its own is during the school holidays, as the cost of childcare didn't change at all. We have had au pairs since I went back to work when our eldest was 7 months old. It just works so much better for us. We have had 10 au pairs over 6 years (3 were with us less than a week as it didn't work out, and 1 was a 4 week short-term bridging au pair). We are still in touch with 6 of them, and 4 regularly call the kids to keep in touch. One calls every weekend from France. With an au pair, it means we have a babysitter on tap - usually twice a week and with having no family here, another adult that children can depend on is invaluable. We also always employed people 24 and above. Going forwards with no au pair (closed borders) we have a lovely mum from the local college doing all pick ups and staying for 1 hour from 3pm to 4pm. Bash and I work from home on alternate days, and whoever is working from home will drop off the kids. The lady has agreed a weekly fee of $400 per week for the school holidays. The kids have 3 activities during the week - swimming lessons which is $1,600 ish for the whole year, music lessons for $750 for the whole year, and gymnastics for $750 ish for the whole year. Starting next month, we are dropping gymnastics. Swimming is a life skill so those lessons will continue until they become very proficient at swimming.

• Personal care: This is an average cost. My hair is very short and I cut it myself. I also cut Bash's hair. The children have long hair but I braid it myself. Conditioner, body wash, shea butter, etc are always bought with groceries, so has been calculated in there. Our hair clipper is a few years old. I spent $300 on makeup 2 years ago, but it's sitting there unused as I'm not one to use makeup. I spend about $60 every 3 months on my body cream. Body cream for the kids and the rest of the family is done with the grocery shopping. I spend about $360 on perfumes per annum, and $360 on waxing per annum.

• Travel: We are very big on travel. In 2018, we spent 23k on a 5 country trip over 6 weeks. In 2019, we spent about 8k including an 8 day trip to New Caledonia that turned into a 21 day trip! We spent 18 days touring the South Island over Christmas and New Year. In our first year in NZ, we spent every other weekend tiki touring somewhere in the North Island. Back in the UK, thanks to Ryanair, Easyjet, ferries, and Eurostar, we spent a lot of time traversing Europe and Africa. To give you an idea, our eldest is 6.5 and he's been to 28 countries. It's a lot more expensive to travel from NZ. One of our biggest dreams is to take about 2 years out and travel, but due to the cost of countless IVFs and a huge move across the world, we're re-evaluating those plans and are increasingly leaning towards travelling 12 weeks every year instead, with 3 weeks in the UK to see family and 9 weeks to explore somewhere else. We are not doing much travel this year. We haven't decided about Chritsmas yet - we have to find a swap somewhere close to Wellington, maybe Napier. However, we have an 8 week, 4 country trip planned for next winter if the borders do open! We almost always swap houses. We go to their house, they come to ours. When we went to the South Island, New Caledonia, and Australia, we also swapped cars. Our previous landlord in Auckland was happy with us doing that. In her own words, it means there's someone looking after the house when we're away. She also got into swapping as she hadn't heard about it before and very enthusiastically jumped into it! We now have 34 house swaps under our belt across about 14 countries. We have requested permission from our current landlord and they initially came back with a no, but have decided they want to know more rather than an outright no. A house swap means we have no accommodation costs, often no car costs, and the same food costs as at home as we would then cook in a well stocked kitchen rather than eat out. We have also on occasion had food made and waiting for us, and I have reciprocated the same for when swappers come to ours. We also get the benefit of local knowledge and practically live like locals. My dream would be a 6 month swap to somewhere in France or Quebec. Let's see what life throws at us! For the 6 week, 5 country trip, we swapped throughout the trip - starting from Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Jordan, Israel and Cyprus. They all went to our UK home which was being run as an Airbnb at that point. One of our short term plans is to buy a 2 bed house in either the Kapiti Coast or in the Wairarapa solely for house swaps.

• Insurance: We have not bothered with contents insurance as all our stuff is about 10 years old now. We plan to take out life insurance in the next few weeks, especially as we travel often, have young children, and have a mortgage in another country. We get travel insurance and had to use it in 2019. It paid out to the tune of $13k. We had our passports stolen, and had to pay for emergency travel documents and last minute flights. All was reimbursed.

• Pets: Can't have pets with a semi-nomadic lifestyle. The kids have been asking and the answer has always been no. Our current neighbours have a dog. The children get to walk the dog 3 times a week. Win, win!

• Gifts and donations: I come from a “it takes a village” culture and community, so I always set aside money to fund any fees, hospital payments, etc for my extended family. I would not be where I am today without that collective support, so I pay it forward often. We spent $3,000 in 2019. COVID put a total fear in me as I was completely worried about the implications of having to fund medical care for numerous family members should push come to shove. I am very pleased to report that it has not been an issue at all. Phew! We do not donate to any charities - I personally won't, although I won't stop my husband from doing so.

Remaining income

We tend to make decisions as we go with regards to excess money. For one, I need access to some form of cash should my family have any emergency expenses come up. We aim to save a minimum of $3,000 every month. Sometimes we save more. That has certainly been the case this year so far.

We don’t tend to splurge. Birthdays, anniversaries, and Chritsmas gifts are usually trips of some sort. We’re more likely to take a quick weekend trip if we have excess money than buy an item.

Inviting feedback from readers

Is buying a 2nd UK property a good idea? We know the market well. It’s also where we would potentially end up when we retire. It would mean taking on more debt, especially as it’s a stronger currency, but the rents would more than adequately cover any outgoings. However, one bad tenant would wipe out any savings we have. Or should we just pay down the one mortgage and become mortgage-free, especially as we have no desire to own or hold a property portfolio?

Does anyone currently buy, renovate, and sell here in New Zealand? What should we look out for? What areas should we try and concentrate on? We’re hoping to do this with a family friend, but they are as clueless about the NZ property market as we are! Any particular books to read? I’ve read the Greame Fowler books and those are a great start.