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Chapter 1: What is the significance of Budget 2026?
Generate is supporting my vision to improve the financial literacy of 100,000 Kiwis by sponsoring Keep the Change. Cheers Generate! Head to generatekiwisaver.co.nz forward slash change to find out more. Welcome back. You are listening to another episode of KeepTheChange.co.nz's Marimau. I hope you are doing well on this lovely long weekend at the time of recording for me.
By the time you listen, it will have been and gone, but I hope you enjoyed that. I'm getting excited. I am off to the FIFA Football World Cup. in maybe 11 days or something. So go through LA to start with and watch New Zealand play Iran and then going across to Fort Worth, I believe, to watch England versus Croatia, which should be something a little bit different.
Then to Canada from there for a game against Egypt and Belgium. Hopefully, the Kiwi team can make it out of the pool. That would be a huge achievement for football, but it's going to be exciting to be getting in the mix over there and seeing how many Kiwi people are going over there too. So I'm going to try and make some content whilst over there, get the odd little potty going.
The audio quality won't be as sharp as the studio or this, but be recording off the phone. And if I bump into some interesting characters, Try to sit down for a quick yarn where I get some time and then just a little bit of content over on Instagram. So make sure that you are tuning in over on Instagram and keeping an eye on what I'm getting up to over there.
I'll see what fascinating insights we can glean or gleam, not sure which word, from a trip to the United States and Canada. Any suggestions in Vancouver, let me know as well. Apparently a hell of a spot. And Fort Worth as well, let me know. Right, this week, big week for me. Big couple of weeks, actually. I've been around the country a little bit.
Nelson, Bay of Plenty, Napier, Wellington, back to Wellington later this week as well. So doing a fair bit of travel. It's quite interesting. Every time I go to the airport, I bumper to someone listening to Keep the Change. or a listener, or a follower on Instagram.
I assume it's that people are traveling, so maybe then they're more inclined to be listening to the podcast, or maybe they can afford to be traveling, so therefore they're at an airport, or maybe even in the Koro Lounge as well, and can afford to be in there. I don't know, but I can't go to the airport anymore without bumping into somebody, which is really cool.
And I saw someone the other day in Napier. Shout out to them. I think it was Justine. I tried to remember the name. I think. Sorry if I got that wrong. Came up and showed me they were actually listening to Keep the Change, the podcast, and had just finished listening to it on the plane. So, so cool to see.
And it is so, yeah, rewarding for me to see people learning from the content and taking action. And even just the content coming in recently about people investing. Also, I bumped into a lad. I can't remember his name. Sorry if you're listening too, mate. He's going to the World Cup with his dad and has paid for the bulk of his trip via his photography side hustle. So how cool is that?
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Chapter 2: How does attending the budget event impact the speaker's perspective?
That's what I'm interested in. Because what can happen while another politician can come along and they might end up in and they might go, no, we're not going to do that anymore. And this is what we see a lot of in New Zealand. So my takeaway from that is that All of these budgets and shit are built on assumptions and often the assumptions aren't that accurate.
And in such a volatile world now, it makes it tricky to forecast and to budget as well. So that was sort of the, yeah, hopefully that gives you a little bit of a behind the scenes of how the whole thing works. We then recorded a pod. We're probably, I'd say, one of the first in New Zealand to actually record a podcast inside of there.
We had a few people looking at us like, oh shit, they're recording a podcast. You think, well, it's a modern form of podcasting. of media. But most people were writing and stuff. Also, I did notice, like, it's fucking inefficient. So, you know, you've got maybe 300 something people in there.
A lot of them are just taking the government data and putting it into their pre-drafted doc that they roll out every year to then send to their clients. So, Does that actually add that much value? Like your client's reading it on your website rather than the government's website and they add these quotes and a little bit of summary. But does it have a lot of context in it? Dunno.
But also, what could be way more efficient? Well, actually, if people are allowed to use the internet and could just go, hey, here's the government information, here's our template that we roll out to our clients, roll it into AI, bang, can you fill that out? Boom, done. You're not manually doing it. So I think the whole budget thing's probably going to be
be, look and feel a lot different into the future, especially with AI. But it reminds me too that data is nothing without interpretation or your thoughts about it. And this is something I've learned massively building a following on LinkedIn, one of the biggest followings in the country on LinkedIn. Like people don't give a fuck if you reshare shit. Okay. They want your perspective on that.
They want your take on it. They want some context to it. Not like, oh, great. We had, you know, a thousand people come to this, reposted someone else's image. Yo, give us your thoughts. Give us some opinion. Give us some context. Give us some comparison to prior. What did it mean to you? And those are the things that win.
So, you know, I kind of watch some of these organisations that have got bigger budgets, bigger resource, way further down the path. And I think, you know, we're whippersnappers doing little things. And I think, far out. You still haven't clicked that people want this put into their plain language. They don't want some quote from this massive important person in your organisation saying,
that's made up, but they want to know, what does this mean for me? Give me some context. Break this down into plain English. So that's a way that I've been able to build a business that turns over $2 million.
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Chapter 3: What are the key themes and announcements in Budget 2026?
And eventually that shit, you know, fades and it goes a different way. And you're kind of seeing it now where content creators are going to more sporting events and, you know, you're watching that rather than watching the rugby player that's had, you know, X amount of games and they're really old and they used to be really, you know, respected but...
Like, is that the demographic you want to listen to? Like, everything's changing and breaking, and the content creators are breaking into the space and doing different things. So you can apply the same sort of model.
And that's often why I'm interviewing people on the Keep the Change podcast that are sort of applying that for you to see, oh, wow, they've done that in the baking industry or the bakery. And... Whatever it may be. Accounting, for me, for instance. And there's just so many examples of it. It gets me really fired up, as you can tell. Now, let's get back to the budget.
So the challenging thing is obviously trying to work out what's going to matter for you guys the most. And a few things that I spotted in there, and you'll probably be all over them by now, so I'll rush through them, but the government believe that they don't have many lollies to hand out. That's their overarching take. National are like, we don't have a heap of cash.
We don't want to put Kiwi people more into debt. We don't have a lot of lollies to hand out. the key themes seem to be around investing into infrastructure that would create jobs and growth. So I think their core belief is that if we're building shit, well, that's going to support jobs.
And there's actually a quote in one of the things that I read was that the infrastructure commission suggests that each billion dollars of investment supports four and a half thousand jobs. Now, I don't think the word says creates. It says supports. So I think what they mean is if we're building a road, a hospital, then you need contractors, subcontractors. Those people are then eating locally.
They're then using the grocery store. They're going to the dentist. They might even need a rental in the area. They're from out of town working on that project, whatever. So there's economic activity. So each billion dollars of investment supports 4,500 jobs. They said something like this budget provides for 220,000 jobs.
I mean, shit, we probably need to get some fucking planes back from Australia to be able to do those jobs to start with at this rate. But I don't know how they work that out. But I did spot that it says that a billion dollars of investment supports four and a half thousand jobs. So that was my take on it. Now, there's money for roads, the rail network, hospital infrastructure, and upgrades.
Now, you probably can't really argue with that, right? Roads, rail, hospital, infrastructure, school classrooms as well. Even buying land, I think, in Tauranga and Queenstown to set us up for growth in those areas to then have schools there.
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Chapter 4: How does the government plan to address infrastructure and job creation?
And if you're going to need those things, you're going to have to spend money on it eventually. And that's what a budget is designed to do. When are we going to allocate that money towards that, whether it's a household budget, or a nationwide budget. You know, it might be, okay, one of the kids is going to need braces. Like, when are we going to slot that in? How's that going to work?
So you're budgeting for it ahead of time. Now, there was funding for $50 per week in the in-work tax credit to help working families with increased fuel prices. And I'm pretty sure we already knew about that. So it was kind of, you know, probably like a bit of a pre-election that's been factored into that budget.
But it did look like they've put aside more funding, I think around like $450 million, for possible future temporary response of the conflict. And they hope that they don't need to use it. Now, jog your memory. Remember, we kind of did the same thing during COVID where they put some, maybe like a billion dollars and they're like, oh, we have this funding set aside to help with COVID. Yeah.
We didn't use it, so we're going to give it out to people that earn $70,000 or less. And I think they ended up dishing out $890 million or something like that to help the cost of living. And now guess what the key election issue people are talking about is? Politicians will even say this leading into the election. What's the key issue leading into this next election?
The cost of living for people. Well, fuck me. Doling out $890 million from spare money left over. Yeah. didn't really solve the cost of living. Of course, maybe it aided some people at that time, but people were critical of that at the time. Other people liked it. That's for you to decide. I'm not going to take a side on that, but it was kind of like, oh, we've got some spare money.
We're going to give it out. These guys are like, we're going to put it aside. The blue team are like, we're going to put it aside. We hope we don't need to use it. I don't think that they will just go, right, well, we didn't need to use it. Should we not need to? We're going to give it out and we're going to find a way to give it out. They'll end up reallocating that.
So I guess the different parties have different ways to do things, and this is how you end up learning a lot more. And you've got to think about this at your personal side too. You might end up not spending as much, but you budgeted for it on a Renault, for instance. What do you do with that? Do you go, oh, great, Renault coming under budget?
Or do you go, and you go, right, we're going to reallocate that in the future to something else, might even put it aside as a bit of a repair fund for the Renault that we've done? Or do you go, shit, well... Might as well go down to the Casa, or might as well go on a holiday, or might as well go and blow it anyway because we'd sort of budgeted to spend it.
Same thing, you might go on an overseas trip, for instance. You budget to take X amount of money, and you take that, and you get to two days to go, or we haven't spent it. Do you bring it home with you, or do you go, oh, we're here now, we budgeted for it, we might as well spend it? Those are individual decisions, and everybody runs a budget. differently.
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Chapter 5: What changes are proposed regarding foreign investment fund taxes?
If a government, as these funds get bigger, whether it's your KiwiSaver, your investments, as those figures get bigger... and then a political party in the future wants to tax those, you're going to go, whoa, whoa, whoa, man, hands off my cash. Hands the fuck off my hard work.
And that political party could become out of favour very, very quickly with a voting base that they thought they would be able to convince. Now, you can do this with income taxes, because typically, they make them at a really high level. So they'll put another 45 cent tax rate in eventually for people earning over, say, like 200K. It's just about inevitable.
I don't know when they'll do it or who will do it, but it's probably coming. They did it in 2021 from 33 to 39. What's the first thing we say? Oh, people who earn over 180K must be minted. Like, who gives a fuck? It doesn't impact me either. So it's easy to get away with.
When you start getting a whole group of people that start investing in different asset classes and those figures start to become meaningful to them, And then you say, hey, now we're going to tax that. So, yeah, I'm intrigued what some of these political parties are going to do. Are they going to make a change early before these figures get bigger?
Or do they wait and try and do this and go, oh, shit, we can't get that past people? So that's going to be fascinating because the whole landscape of where people are now saving and investing and accumulating their wealth is changing and we've got more exposure to financial assets. We lag behind historically like we haven't done that.
And now you may not be massively impacted by the changes, whatever that change could be, but you might see yourself as somebody who could be impacted in the future doing that. And you're kind of seeing this in Australia where they've introduced other forms of capital gains tax and some young entrepreneurs and stuff like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this ain't it.
And I think this is going to be fascinating to watch play out in New Zealand too because there is a big cultural shift towards building up different forms of investments outside of property. Anyway, those costs of ageing population, rising healthcare infrastructure, superannuation, they are not disappearing any time soon. And they have to be in a government's budget. They have to prepare for it.
And that money has to come from somewhere and that's money that then can't go into other areas. So this is the point of this money mail. This means that your personal financial plan matters more ever, more than ever. And more than ever, to you as a household, you can't look at all the pressure that the government have on them of where they have to spend the money.
You can't flippantly be like, she'll be right, mate. Someone will look after me. Someone will save me. You've got to be thinking about how you can prepare your own self for yourself into the future, your family, your community, maybe even your sporting clubs, whatever the things are that you care about.
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