Picture the Sunday-night version of this. One partner has the banking app open on the couch, the other is squinting at a Hnry summary on their phone, and there's a Google Sheet on the laptop that stopped being accurate around the time the second kid arrived. Salary lands fortnightly. The side hustle money turns up whenever it turns up. A distribution from the business shows up twice a year, and nobody's ever quite sure which week. Four income streams, and not one place that adds them up.

In this episode, SortMe Resident Money Writer Hugo Jonston explains why most "side hustle" advice in NZ is really tax advice wearing a budgeting hat — set aside 20–33% for IRD, register for GST at $60k, use a secondary code on the second PAYE job. Hnry, Solo and a good accountant have that side sorted. The bit they leave untouched is the household itself: what can you spend this week, given the money arrives in four rhythms that never line up? Hugo walks through the six-step method SortMe households use to crack it — about an hour to set up, and after that it mostly runs itself.

In this episode:

• The Sunday-night scene every multi-income household knows — banking app, Hnry summary, an out-of-date Google Sheet, and four income streams that never line up
• Why most NZ "side hustle" advice is tax advice in disguise, and the household question (what can you actually spend this week?) that nobody answers
• Step 1 — Get every income stream onto one screen via Akahu open banking, with salary, side hustle, dividends and business drawings sorted by where the money came from
• Step 2 — Sort income by how it behaves not how big it is: dependable (salary, steady rental), wobbly (freelance, side hustle), lumpy (distributions, dividends, bonuses) — and the rule that you only plan the household on the dependable income, with the rest as savings or goal fuel
• Step 3 — Make tax visible before it's owed: Hnry skims at the door, Solo shows a live figure, or the dull-and-reliable auto-transfer of 25–33% of every non-PAYE deposit to a separate-bank savings account
• Step 4 — If one income stream runs through an entity (sole trader, LTC, trust, rental), the second leak no ordinary household view catches — business spending that came off a personal card — and how SortMe Pro's Entity Management workspace tags it on the spot so the deduction doesn't disappear by 31 March
• Step 5 — Budget the household, not the stream: $90k corporate + $20k Shopify + $180k business stake + $8k dividends isn't four budgets fighting each other, it's one household with four taps running into the same tub, and a daily-recalculated Safe to Spend that nets everything against real commitments
• Step 6 — The 15-minute monthly review (Safe to Spend, Cashflow Health Score, goals) and SortMe's subscription sweep finding an average $2,371.27/year in forgotten charges — with multi-account households tending to be the worst offenders
• The three-tool stack that actually works — Hnry for tax at the door, the accountant for the year-end return, SortMe for the messy middle the other two leave alone

Read the full article: sortme.com/post/how-to-budget-side-hustle-nz

A BNZ ad for a 1.6% "high-interest" savings account. That doesn't even keep pace with inflation. The default narrative is that a savings account means whatever your own bank put in front of you — and on the four big banks' everyday savings pages, you're looking at 0.05% to 0.40%. A household with $50,000 sitting in an everyday account at 0.10% is earning $50 a year in interest.

In this episode, SortMe Founder & CEO Carl Thompson breaks down where to actually park your cash in NZ in 2026, with Kernel Wealth CEO Dean Anderson on the record throughout. The headline rate doesn't tell the whole story — two products can show the same number and still be very different underneath on risk, tax wrapper, and how fast you can get your money back when you need it. Dean's line that stuck: "It's time to look outside your day-to-day bank. Globally we've seen the rise of fintech players able to offer better outcomes for customers, with a great user experience. Find a partner that can help you optimise your savings and investments so you can achieve your financial goals earlier."

In this episode:

• Why the 1.6% bank ad doesn't keep pace with inflation, and how moving $50,000 from a 0.10% everyday account to a top PIE savings fund earns roughly $1,080/year instead of $50
• The two things the headline rate hides — risk (a bank deposit is government-protected, a money-market fund isn't) and access (Westpac's Notice Saver pays 3% but you wait 32 days)
• The layered framework most households actually need — a small instant-access slice (~$5k) for true emergencies, then the bulk in something higher-paying you can free up in 1–7 days
• Wedge (3.00% PIE, next-business-day access, AA weighted-average credit rating) and Kernel Cash Plus (~2.83% PIE, trade date + 1, $220m+ fund coming up four years old) — the two NZ standout money-market savings funds, and why they're funds, not bank deposits
• The PIE tax wrapper math — for a 39% earner, the same 3.00% gross is worth 1.83% net in a standard account vs 2.16% net in a PIE; for under-33% earners, Dean's blunt take is the wrapper advantage largely disappears
• The three traps inside bank HISAs — most "savings" accounts at the big four are under 1%, bonus rates drop to 0.05% the moment you withdraw, and notice savers (Westpac 32-day at 3%) are where the real bank yield lives
• Index funds as semi-liquid cash for money you've decided you won't touch for 6–12+ months — Kernel NZ 50 and Global 100 at 0.25% fees, with trade date + 2 settlement as a psychological feature if you tend to raid the HISA
• Term deposits for defined-date cash (3.45–3.65% at 6 months, 3.85–3.95% at 12 months, higher at non-bank deposit takers) — and why they're a bad fit for an emergency fund
• The Deposit Compensation Scheme trade-off — $100k per depositor per licensed bank, but money-market funds sit outside it, so you're trading scheme cover for the fund's (AA/A-rated) credit quality and extra yield
• The five questions to ask before you move money — when you'll need it, your marginal tax rate, whether you'll really leave it alone, the size of the pile, and whether you're banking with the wrong place for this
• What SortMe shows you — every cash balance in one view, Cashflow Health Score flagging a high cash buffer, and the Recommendations engine that shifted an average $14,200 per household last quarter (worth ~$620/year in extra interest)

Read the full article: sortme.com/post/where-to-park-money-nz-2026

The most expensive thing about being self-employed in New Zealand isn't tax. It's the deductible business expense that came off your personal credit card in November and never made it to the accountant in March. A self-employed Kiwi on the 33% marginal rate who misses $4,000 of legitimate business deductions a year is overpaying IRD by roughly $1,320 — every year. Across five years that's $6,600 of someone else's money sitting permanently in Wellington.

In this episode, SortMe Resident Money Writer Hugo Jonston unpicks the unsolved part of the self-employed financial stack in 2026. Hnry takes 1% plus GST and pays you a take-home number. Solo flags real-time tax owed. Your accountant pulls it together in March. What none of them do is track the business spending that's already left your personal accounts — the Officeworks run on the personal Visa, the Adobe subscription still charging the card you signed up with in 2018, the Uber to the client meeting, the home-office portion of the power bill, the half-yearly domain rego that auto-charges in May without anyone noticing. "If the cashflow between personal and entity goes one direction (business income into your personal account), the tax tools handle it. If it goes the other direction (personal money spent on business), there's no tool watching."

In this episode:

• The real cost of self-employment in NZ — not the tax bill, but the deductions silently lost on the personal card every month, compounding to mid-five figures over a working career
• Why the "two clean sets of accounts" story doesn't survive contact with real life — erratic business income, the laptop charger on a personal Mastercard, the sweep from business to personal to cover the mortgage
• What a self-employed budgeting tool actually has to do in 2026 — hold personal and entity accounts in one app but logically separate, with the same login and dashboard
• The mechanic that closes the gap — tagging a personal-card transaction to the entity in real time, attaching the receipt and a note, so the transaction lives in both places (personal cashflow stays accurate, deduction doesn't get lost)
• Why receipt capture has to be five-second friction or nobody does it — mobile photo at the counter, email forward to a capture inbox, amount and vendor auto-extracted
• The hero feature that retroactively justifies the subscription — a one-button March zip of categorised CSV, receipts, invoices and a cover summary the accountant can read in two minutes
• The three-tool stack that actually works in 2026 — Hnry or Solo for tax, your accountant for the annual return, and SortMe Pro for everything in between
• The dollar maths — roughly $1,320/year in recovered deductions at the 33% rate, plus the average $2,371.27/year SortMe finds in forgotten subscriptions, on a $399/year Pro subscription
• The 30-minute setup — Akahu connection for ANZ, ASB, BNZ, Westpac, Kiwibank, Co-op, Heartland and SBS, plus KiwiSaver, Sharesies, Hatch and Kernel; create the entity workspace; spend a Sunday backfilling three months; tag as you go from there

Read the full article: sortme.com/post/budgeting-app-self-employed-nz