It was only a few months later that Latta revealed a mixture of chemotherapy and medicine had removed the terminal aspect of his diagnosis.
“The thing I’ve discovered is that oncology, there’s lots of paths and options and there’s all these kind of new wonder drugs coming out,” he told Liam Dann on the podcast in late March.
“The original tumour is kind of gone and all of the original metastatic stuff is gone. It jumped fence a little bit, but that’s now on the retreat.
“So things are looking pretty good. I’ve had some dire moments in the last nine months.”
The experience has had on lasting impact on Latta.
“I’ve become a huge advocate of insurance. [My wife] Natalie and I, everyone [who] comes over, we just grill ‘em; have you got health insurance, check your assurance, have you got income protection?”
In his decades-long career as a clinical psychologist, including fronting a dozen TV shows, money and personal finance has come up several times, including his TVNZ1 series Mind Over Money.
However, his experience with cancer has put things into perspective.
“After you take care of the basics and you can pay the bills and feed the kids and do all that kinda stuff, [money] doesn’t matter. I’d trade anything to be free of the whole cancer cloak.
“The money stuff literally doesn’t matter to me. What matters is time. Money buys me time because insurance has meant that I’ve been able to get access to some of those drugs and, literally, I think I’d be dead now if I hadn’t been able to do that.”
He does have one bit of advice for people who are betting big on a winning Lotto ticket for their financial success: “I think I’ve bought them about once or twice. To me ... Lotto feels like you’re giving up. If your financial plan is Lotto, you’ve given up, and so you need to kind of get a better financial plan.“
As a psychologist, he can understand the appeal.
“I think it’s just that immediate thing. We’re really good at imagining spending the money and what it would be like and the rest of it, and we don’t imagine the vast swimming pool full of ping pong balls ...
“And actually, you’re better off putting that $5 towards paying down some expenses or buying a coffee or anything.”
Now that cancer is on the backburner, Latta is refocusing on his passion for writing, and on providing sound advice to make people’s lives easier.
His latest venture is Parentland, an app he has been developing for several years that is designed to give people advice personalised to their kids’ development and their temperament.
“So if you’ve got a stubborn 9-year-old, that’s different to an easy-going 5-year-old. Yeah. And so the way that you get those two kids to go to bed at a time that works for everyone is gonna be different.
“And so we’ve kind of been able to take that kind of secret source of how to do that and put that into an app.”
There’s a lot of evidence-based material in the app, Latta said, lamenting the vast range of AI-based material available that some parents are relying on.
“This is a thing I’ve been working on for, I don’t know, it really has been kind of 20 years. A lot in the last 10 years and intensively over the last six, and [I’ve] put thousands of hours into this thing.
“But I think it’s really good and I think it can be helpful for people, and we’re deliberately pricing it low so that as many people as possible can get access to it.
“We don’t want it to be something that only people with tons of money can afford. It’s like less than a coffee a week.”
Listen to the full episode to hear more from Nigel Latta about his journey from psychologist to presenter, and how his cancer journey has shaped his life going forwards.
Money Talks is a podcast run by the NZ Herald. The series is hosted by Liam Dann, business editor-at-large for the Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist, and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Herald in 2003.
Money Talks is available on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
