“I learned to make every dollar last.”
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Aunty Pali knows about money. She has spent years working in finance with Westpac's Total Money Management team, helping families learn to get better with money. But before all of that, she was a young mum on the Hibiscus Coast, trying to make a monthly wage do the work of two.
In the 1990s, Pali and her family packed up Wellington and headed north. The rent was much higher, the neighbourhood was new, and her husband's work took him overseas for long stretches at a time. Which left Pali – at home with young kids, in a community where they were the only Polynesian family on the street – figuring it out largely on her own.
She didn't panic. Instead, she got smart with money. "I learned to make every dollar last," she says. When the budget was tight, Pali went back to the basics, like flour, eggs, milk and butter. Four ingredients that together can become bread, porridge, pancakes, scones, or a meal from almost nothing.
She cooked big pots of soup and filled the freezer. And she made sure nothing went to waste. The kids' lunches were simple – good, balanced kai that kept them going. "You don't need much," she'll tell you, "if you know what to do with what you've got."
Waiting instead of wasting
For clothing and anything else the family needed, she hit the op-shops first and waited for sales second. "If I needed something that couldn't be found at an op-shop, I would save up and wait rather than buying it straight away." In a world of easy credit and Afterpay, that kind of patience sounds almost radical. But for Pali, it was just how things worked.
A lot of that came from her grandparents, who kept a garden, wasted nothing, and lived within their means. “Their version of wealth wasn't about what you owned. It was about what you grew, what you shared, and how well you looked after each other,” says Pali. She absorbed those lessons without realising it.
She's also honest about how that upbringing has affected her attitude. “Growing up with very little can wire you to see money as the measure of everything”, she explains. And she found herself putting some of that pressure onto her kids. Her daughter was talented at tennis, and the family invested heavily in the game. The only problem? Her daughter had other ideas. It's a lesson Pali tells the story with a laugh now … “back your kids with everything you’ve got, but make sure you're following their dream, not yours”.
“It’s not a tapu subject”
Pali’s mother also taught her a valuable lesson about saving money. She raised her children through real hardship, saw a budget adviser, and owned her own home by 50, long before any housing scheme existed to help her. "She did it tough for a long time, but she taught me a lot about resilience and discipline.”
Through her years working in finance, Pali has seen how stress, shame and silence can make money problems much harder to solve. “People sit with debt like it's a secret, when really it's just a situation, and situations can be changed,” she says.
"It's not a tapu subject – money problems happen to everyone. There is no shame or judgement in asking for help."
And if she could share one thing with young people today? "Be less focused on money as the measure of wealth,” she says. “You can be rich in whānau, rich in friends, rich in health. That’s what actually matters."