Five-Fold Friday: Karma kick-backs; Who is the FSF?; KiwiSaver health check-up; Penny case for tax thoughts; Personal MBA

By Amanda Morrall (email)

Welcome to  Five-fold Friday. 14 delirious coffee-free days and counting. I just might make it to 30. Huzzah!

1) Savings and Spending

In a Take Five for personal finance earlier this week, I linked to a story on how to harness your passion into project. The author suggests you should be prepared to sacrifice money and time for your passion, and that non-financial compensations could be just as rewarding.

I wouldn't disagree however interesting things can happen when you pursue your passion.

Exhibit A:  I am a self professed yoga evangelist. I love it. I  have experienced the benefits personally and also seen how transformative it can be for many others. I decided to invest in my passion a few years ago and became a certified teacher.

Now, I get paid for sharing my passion and what's more, I get free or heavily discounted classes.

This give and receive arrangement works wonders for my budget.

2) Credit and Debt

I interviewed Kirk Hope this week, executive director of the Financial Services Federation.

This is the professional body for second and first-tier finance companies.

Although they've been around since 1965, not many people have heard of them.

Here's Hope talking about regulatory changes facing the sector and what the industry is doing to prevent people from getting into debt dramas.

3) KiwiSaver

After months of hassling my colleagues to take a greater interest in their KiwiSaver accounts, they are finally starting to listen.

Interest apparently kicks in at the point your KiwiSaver balance is roughly equivalent in value to a small car. You can choose to wait for that wake-up call or take a more proactive approach.

Inland Revenue keeps tabs on the amounts you, your employer and Government are putting into it which can easily accessed on-line as registered users of their system.

I'll make it easy. Here's the link. Book mark it, register and take a peak. If you are feeling very ambitious do the same with your provider to find out how much your account has grown over the time you've had it. Oh, and while you are at it, make sure you have the correct PIR rate.

Take it another step further by checking your fund's after-fee performance and comparing it to others of a similar nature through our performance ranking list Make sure you are comparing your fund's performance to KiwiSavers of the same variety; be it conservative, moderate, balanced, growth and aggressive.

Also, if you are looking at the one-year performance, that's the most recent 12 months you have been invested from June 30, 2011 working back.

4) Death and Taxes

The Penny and Hooper case continues to make news as the implications are digested by lawyers, accountants and business owners using trust as part of their operational structure.

Lawyers Chapman Tripp, in their most recent newsletter, said the Supreme Court decision is "relevant to a much broader swathe of the economy than any tax case in the past 35 years, potentially affecting the related party employees of any family company."

Partner Casey Plunket elaborates in this commentary.

5) Books.

I have a towering stack of books at my bed-side. Bless you BR for the top-up.

Josh Kaufman's Personal MBA gets the mention here today. Still making my way through it but Kaufman makes a compelling case against spending a small fortune on a business school degree.

Kaufman argues that business schools are making easy profits off of people who would succeed regardless because they're smart, ambitious and hungry. That's because business schools cherry pick the best then take credit for their graduates' success.

He's got a point.

To that end, Kaufman has cobbled together a collection of what he believes to be the pithiest and most pertinent bits of wisdom and lessons from the world's most successful business leaders, then packages it in what purports to be a one-stop self-instructional shop to Master the  Art of Business.

Irrelevant cat cartoon from "Simon's Cat'' series.