u/DramaticWishbone4

Hi all,

My wife and I (both 34) are considering some changes and I wanted to validate if this makes sense:

Current Situation

• 200k and 100k salaries (both on total remuneration contracts aka we pay for our own Kiwisavers)
• ~600k mortgage on an aggressive 10 year term. 1.5k weekly payments . 8 years left
  • Given this is 40% of our net income we opted for relatively comprehensive mortgage/income insurance to cover the risk of this short mortgage term which was thankfully affordable with our ages.
• 20k emergency fund (savings account as our bank doesn't do offset accounts unfortunately)
• 30k in Kiwisaver between the two of us

With Kiwisaver consistently getting worse I've grown uncomfortable with the lack of control for minimal tradeoff; there's no longer any financial incentive for me to contribute and my wife only gets 250 a year which we could still get with a manual ~1k annual contribution.

How does this plan sound?

1. Create an IBKR joint account
2. Take the ~200 a week from our kiwisaver holidays and put it in VOO (maybe with some extra on top as budget permits) up to a maximum of ~99k cost basis
3. At ~99k, switch to Kernel or InvestNow for a PIE Total World Fund to avoid FIF paperwork (maybe Kernel's TWF fund will even exist by the time we get here)

I'm conscious that we've very heavily geared ourselves towards the mortgage and it would take almost 8 years to hit 99k at 250/week anyway although hoping to increase that weekly contribution once some larger purchases are out of the way.