The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You'll Ever Need

Product Information

He also appeared as the financial expert on the SBS show The Nest in 2008. Pape was also previously a regular guest on The 7pm Project. Expenses. This is an everyday trading account that all your bills come out of. Internet, Netflix, phone, utilities, rent, etc. Have your salary go into this box. Find the super fund with the lowest fees and roll everything over to that. The author recommends Hostplus. The recommendation is also to salary sacrifice into your superannuation so that 15% is going in. If you're in the public service you won't need to do this, but the rationale is that the mandatory 9.5% is often insufficient to build a big enough nest egg for retirement. Look, I'm sure you could do a lot worse than follow Scott's advice, especially if you don't have any clear financial goals and want to feel more in control of your money. A good chunk of what he suggests is common sense, and I have started implementing some of his suggestions. But as someone not even remotely close to buying my own home yet, I won't even get past Step 3 of his 9-step plan for several years yet. So more than half the book is only theoretically useful at this stage of my life.

Reason being, in the current climate there’s a very real possibility that you could be underwater for many years.Instead, Vanguard’s offering is a life cycle fund that invests your super based on your age. In simple terms, they automatically reduce the amount of riskier assets, like shares, in your portfolio as you get older and closer to retirement. In all, they make 36 of these adjustments up to your 83rd birthday (with no switching fees), which is far and away the most comprehensive of any Australian super offering. It's about this point that I start to understand why he encourages the reader to drink so much. You need a glass or two under your belt just to get past all the bullshit. Also, not a fan of all these different bank accounts he says to make for this and that. It makes it so much more complicated than it needs to be. Much easier to keep it all in one good interest account and make sure there's enough there for emergencies (which he calls mojo) etc. Yet my plan was always foiled by my older sister, who was the dux of her class, and waited in anticipation all year for her brief bath in the parental sunshine.

However, as someone who works in the community sector and has helped women in this very situation, I don’t think accessing 10 grand from super is high on their priority list. It happened five years ago when a friend asked if I’d speak about retirement at a lunch for his men’s group. Ideally, you’ll host your money with a bank that offers you accounts with a zero card and ATM fee, good interest savings accounts, and online-only accounts. These vary from country to country. In The Barefoot Investor book it recommends using ING if you’re in Australia. So let’s hope the top-performing funds – who collectively invest for millions of Aussies both young and old – take heed of this new type of offering and build something even better for their members.For a finance book, his message is refreshingly anti-materialistic: do you need a BMW when a Holden will do? Why are you wasting your money on a business-class flight when you could build a buffer for old age? But also: don’t be a tight-arse. You should still go to the pub, take holidays and give to charity. Case in point, I spoke to a retiree this week who admitted he’d spent the best years of his life working in a job he hated so that he had ‘enough’ money to retire. Now, five years into retirement, he told me the things that really made him happy are: catching up with his daughter, watching the footy with his son, walking along the beach at low tide, and sitting on the porch in the afternoon sun. And none of them cost him a cent.