It's great that you took the time to post an update. Thank you.I saw this article today about American interest in NZ's new Investor Visa and thought I'd post an update:
We went ahead with the investment and have been in NZ for a couple years now. Decided to avoid PFICs and invested in individual NZ government bonds and individual stocks. It's a small stock market: the main index has just 50 stocks, and really most of that is in the top 20 stocks, so direct indexing is quite feasible. Most of the investment advisors were against indexing (no surprise there) but we decided to stick with the index and it's worked out fine. I haven't compared to their sample initial allocations, so I don't know if we came out ahead for sure. ANZ private was helpful and supported us, and they had relatively low costs for this market. In USD terms, we've lost money due to the weakening of the currency (good in NZD terms, but significantly down in USD terms).
Overall, it was the right move for us and we're quite happy to be in New Zealand.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/544 ... g-new-visa
The old investor visa categories (as low as $2.5M NZD, invested in stocks and bonds) were closed and replaced by a $15M visa that has seen little uptake. That $15M excludes bonds and can be reduced to $5M if invested in higher risk individual businesses, but that's a lot to put into a risky non-diversified investment. NZ is offering a somewhat relaxed investor visa that opens next month. This relaxes the investment required to $10M NZD (about $6M USD) that can be invested in stocks and bonds.
NZ is in many ways "the lucky country" in terms of location, population & way of life. You have the advantages of a First World country & culture, but an exceptional natural environment and much less of the social hierarchy of "the olde worlde". NZ really is genuinely egalitarian. Whilst we cannot say the treatment of the Maoris has been benign, they are in a much better place than the aboriginal peoples in Australia or Canada, say.
The main challenge I would pose to anyone who thinks about moving there is just how far away it is. Not only the travel time and distance, but also the time zones - it makes it very hard to stay in touch with friends and family in Europe or even the USA. Also many things are quite expensive as a result -- transportation costs and a very small domestic market make that.
Statistics: Posted by Valuethinker — Thu Mar 13, 2025 3:12 am — Replies 17 — Views 4608