Leading questions: Greg Whittred

Greg Whittred. Photo / Richard Robinson

Greg Whittred, dean of University of Auckland Business School.

Are you generally frugal with your own spending or do you consider yourself a big spender?

I'm probably more at the spending end than the frugal end.

My wife and I are frequent travellers and we enjoy, shall we say, the good life around wining and dining.

Do you like shopping? If so what do like to spend your money on? If not what do you dislike about it?

I don't like shopping.

I'm a typical male shopper. I go once a year to an upmarket clothes store and buy all my clothes and that's my shopping for the year.

Apart from the necessities of life I don't do a lot of personal spending on knick-knacks, it does go on those other things - food, wine and travel.

Can you recall an experience (good or bad) from your youth that taught you something important about the value of money?

I always worked, everything from stock and station hand to tobacco picker to meat slicer in a bacon factory.

So I have always worked and recognised the value of money.

I left home while I was a uni student and I received an allowance of $18 a week and my share of the rent in a house with five guys in a slum was $17 a week.

So I lived on credit until the vacations came and work was possible which allowed me to retire my accruing debts.

The bank was friends and fools - very venture capital.

Do you have a piece of advice or a favourite quote about money for those just starting out?

From Charles Dickens' David Copperfield: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."