Cooking the Books podcast: Can passive investing be trusted?

Often we expect the cheaper and easier option to be the worst for our money, but it's not necessarily true. Photo / file

Each week the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's the evidence behind the growing trend in passive investing. Hosted by Frances Cook.

The digital revolution is notorious for making things cheaper and easier, and it's doing the same for our investing.

Passive investing, and particularly index funds, have been going for a few decades, but are building up steam with every tech advance.

The idea is that rather than paying a person to pick and choose investments for you, you put your money into a fund that automatically invests your cash across a wide number of companies.

It's set and forget, and no need to pay someone's wages, so is the ultimate in cheap and easy.

There's also a growing number of apps and websites that let you set this up, without needing to go through a broker. So it's a double bargain.

The problem is that sometimes we don't trust these technological changes.

Cheap and easy surely has to come with a downside, right? Not necessarily.

For the latest Cooking the Books podcast I talked to Kernel Wealth founder Dean Anderson.

We discussed why he's a fan of passive investing, whether it can lead to bubbles, and what changes he thinks are coming in the future.

For the interview, watch the video podcast above.

If you have a question about this podcast, or question you'd like answered in the next one, come and talk to me about it. I'm on Facebook here, Instagram here and Twitter here.

You can subscribe to this podcast on iHeartRadio, Apple podcasts app, or Spotify, to make sure you never miss an episode.