Kiwisaver: (lack of) investment results explained

From the Gareth Morgan kiwisaver.com site: What’s going on with your money? IRD is holding all contributions made between 1 July 2007 and 1 October 2007. On 1 October 2007, they will transfer the following to KiwiSaver provider schemes: Your contributions Interest on your contributions (at the Commissioner’s rate, currently 6.6% gross) $1,000 kick-start $20 …

Kiwisaver progress and the market dip

Lot of recent press about Kiwisaver, but I’m missing the real juice – how were those first month results? Well – 92,000 people have signed up to Kiwisaver, which seems a tiny number (4.6%) compared to the working population of 2m or so. However Finance Minister Cullen is happy, figuring that the numbers will grow …

Why I am not excited about Vodafone’s free broadband..

1: 1 GB data cap, though you can sign up to other plans, with the largest 60GB and $2 per extra GB. 2: You need to spend $20 on tolls on your home line. Who uses these anymore? 3: I’m in Perth right now. Actually, to be fair, all and every price decrease for mobile …

Xero – the product

I’ve been playing with Xero’s demo, which is well worth looking at. You land on the dashboard, which has a nice summary of what is going on. What is particularly pleasing though, in true Don’t Make Me Think style, is that you are not just looking at information, but you are being asked to do …

xtra mail customers are going to Yahoo! mail

The big mail transfer is finally coming… and not before time.  Telecom’s somewhat clueless (and expensive) marketers have managed to mangle thing though, for a start using the name “Yahoo!Xtra Bubble” for the new service. Xtra subscribers will get moved to Yahoo Mail (the Beta is great), and will also get Flickr Pro, a 1 …

Economy class sleeping – emerging reality?

They’ve mentioned this before about this before… and now it looks like AirNZ is going to try it. Economy class bunks. From 2010. “One concept showed berths stacked three-high in a herringbone layout along the sides, and another row stacked down the middle of the cabin.  This is something that will allow tourism to NZ …

famous….in KR

Turns out Mod has plastered my photo all over his nice Brass Monkey article in the latest edition of KiwiRider. Gave me quite the shock when I was reading the mag on the flight back to Perth. It was an awesome Brass though.

Direct Broking versus eTrade – Fees

Fees for trading in NZ stocks seem to be still based on ancient premises – percentage takes and high rates. Here are ASB’s fees – they charge you the same $30 for a $500 or $10,000 transaction. Ditto with Direct Broking, who have a slightly lower ticket clipping rate, but still set the baseline at …