Take the pulse of your personal finances with Sort Me

If you’ve always wanted to get a better handle on your personal finances but don’t know where to start, help is at hand.

 

The Retirement Commission’s new online financial check, Sort Me, lets you sit down and take the pulse of your financial health with ease.

 

Sort Me takes most of the basic principles in the Sorted website and condenses them into an online financial check-up, to give you meaningful information in just a few minutes.

 

Sort Me assesses how financially sorted you are by analysing your answers to a series of simple multi-choice questions about your financial fitness.

 

It takes you through eight areas of money management: your goals and dreams; income and making ends meet; your borrowing; saving and investing; protecting your assets; keeping your affairs sorted; big life changes; and your retirement.

 

Some of the questions will be ones we all grapple with from day to day, like “how far does your money go?” and “are you satisfied with your current income?” And others we tend to think about just from time to time like “if you own a home, is it fully insured?”

 

Others, like “do you have a current will?” or “what would happen to your family if you or your partner dies?” we may prefer not to think about, but are very important.

 

Once you’ve submitted your answers, Sort Me gives you a rundown on how you’re doing in each area of your personal finances. It tells you where you are sorted and highlights where you might need to take some action.

 

It then offers some good ideas for what you could start doing right now to get yourself more sorted.

 

The Sort Me on-line check is well timed as most of New Zealand’s 2.11 million workers (Labour force figure from Statistics New Zealand’s 2006 census) will be starting to think about KiwiSaver and whether it fits their financial situation.

 

To make a sound decision about KiwiSaver, first we all need to know what shape our finances are in. Sort Me is designed to do just that.

 

The next step’s about deciding whether to stay in, opt in, or opt out of KiwiSaver. The Retirement Commission has just launched its Sorted KiwiSaver Decision Guide that will help people consider the pros and cons according to their particular financial situation.