Read how Murray brought all his finances together with PocketSmith to protect his family’s future.
I recently retired at the end of 2024, but it was a year earlier than I originally intended, solely due to ill health. I started in the workforce back in 1981, so some of you may think I was around when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but that’s not true — they came after me.
I’ve worked in a variety of jobs over the years. My most recent position was as a student registrar, advising on courses students wanted to take and generally steering them through their courses, amongst other things.
I’ve been married for just shy of 39 years — not sure how my wife has put up with me for so long! We live in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, in a house about the size of a bach on the south coast of NSW. On a clear day, I swear you can see New Zealand…
I take care of the finances, cooking, cleaning and any IT issues that come up — a real house hubby!
I’d had some issues with the health of my heart, so about a year before COVID hit, I decided I needed to get our finances under control and also to educate myself. I looked around for an app or a website that could help, but then quickly dismissed the ones based in the USA as they were too US-centric, and since then, a number of them have closed down. What I wanted was something based in the Pacific region that understood the local currency and that used more familiar vocabulary.
PocketSmith was the one that matched my wishlist. Signing up was easy, and the cost per year was quite reasonable. I’ll also admit — I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for New Zealand, as my mum and dad met and married in NZ, so that also helped me decide.
Dad was serving in the RNZAF, and Mum was an Australian over there on a working holiday. They married in Blenheim and then moved to Christchurch, where Dad trained to become a primary school teacher. They only came back to Australia because Mum was homesick and she wanted to be closer to her parents. Dad taught for most of his working life, but his biggest achievement was that he was one of the founding members of the NSW Teachers’ Credit Union, formed in 1966. It’s now called Teachers Mutual Bank — but I am very proud of my Dad for having had the foresight to get a Credit Union off the ground, way back in the mid-1960s!
Nearly seven years now, and I’m not willing to leave.
With my heart being a bit ‘iffy’ in recent years, I wanted to get our finances sorted so that if anything drastic happened to me, things would be in place for my wife and children, so my primary reason for signing up was estate planning. I doubt many of PocketSmith’s users would fall into this category, but I really needed to gather all the disparate threads of our finances together into one centralised hub. That way, we could see how we were tracking, explore ‘what if’ scenarios, and plan out a budget just in case the worst happened.
The decision to use PocketSmith to give us an overall snapshot with real-time updates of account balances was fortuitous indeed, as I had a heart attack and a double bypass at the end of 2024. However, my wife knew exactly where to look if I hadn’t made it through, so I was able to rest in that fact, knowing she could navigate the biggest ‘what if’ a person can go through, by being able to quickly see the big picture. That might sound a bit morbid, but my heart attack came out without any warning, and in hindsight, I made the right decision to go with PocketSmith.
Centralising everything that I could with real-time feeds, although some Superannuation numbers I have to punch in manually due to one bank in particular not allowing me to access them electronically. But the beauty of PocketSmith is that it gives me an almost instantaneous view. It also means I can spot any fraudulent activity on any of our day-to-day accounts, so I know where every dollar is and it’s all neatly accounted for.
I still feel like I am only scratching the surface, but the times I do get stuck, I find the help screens inside PocketSmith useful, as well as the Learn Centre. But if I am really, really stuck for an answer, a quick email to the support team is usually answered within 24 hours, and the people I’ve dealt with over the years have been incredibly helpful.
People may not realise this, but if you have a financial advisor, you can allow them to access your PocketSmith account so they can also see everything in one spot.
Renewing my subscription to PocketSmith! Seriously though, I can’t quite see how we managed our finances before we started using it.
