Who Do We Turn To?

Abstract

New Zealand households turn to remarkably different advisors when they make financial decisions, and the patterns map onto cultural ancestry in ways that financial-literacy and demographic models alone do not adequately explain. Pacific and Asian respondents in the NZ Fin-Ed Centre survey report relying on family members and community members for routine money-management decisions at roughly twice the rate of Pākehā respondents, and the gap survives education, income, and language-proficiency controls.

The behavioural-finance literature has long treated advice-seeking as a financial-capability behaviour shaped by information and access constraints; the cross-cultural psychology literature has independently argued that the disposition is rooted in **cultural orientation** along the collectivism–individualism continuum. This paper combines the two literatures and frames the question as a cultural advice-seeking map: who seeks help, who is trusted, which channels are used, and where capability support may fail to reach people. Collectivist cultural orientation privileges in-group trust: family and community advisors carry a high trust premium that may offset the information premium of formal sources. Individualist cultural orientation inverts this.

The empirical setting is the NZ Fin-Ed Centre ethnicity-segmented survey, supplemented by RBNZ household-finance indicators and Stats NZ ethnic-composition data. The existing March 2026 working draft applies descriptive segmentation and a Power BI / WhiteMode reporting framework that has already surfaced the headline advice-source gap.

We propose extending the existing analysis with three complementary ML layers: BERTopic latent-topic modelling of the open-text 'where do you turn for financial advice' responses to recover the data-driven advice-source typology; latent-class analysis of the multi-item advice-seeking battery to identify typological advice-seeking profiles that the standard categorical approach suppresses; and a Causal Forest decomposition of the ethnicity-gap to recover the conditional effect of ethnicity on advice-source choice after partialling out demographic and capability controls. The proposed extensions, once implemented, would supply culturally-segmented targets for NZ financial-capability programme design and identify which informal-advice channels need formal-system bridging support.

Data & Methods