Cooking The Books

Each week the NZ Herald's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's the financial independence movement, and whether normal people can give it a try. Hosted by Frances Cook. Financial independence is something you might have seen floating around, and been curious about. On the face of it, it sounds too good to be true. Save and invest hard, and you build up enough investment income that you don't have to work anymore. Surely that's something that's only possible for rich people? It's open to more people than you might think. Here's the maths behind it. The idea is that you work out how much you need in a year to live the life you want. So you might be happy living a very frugal lifestyle, which always makes things easier. Or you might enjoy some of life's nicer trappings, and want to keep them. Whatever that number is, you need a nest egg of 25x that, then the idea is that you can withdraw 4% of it each year, in order to live that lifestyle you like. For the latest podcast episo