Kiwi Saver

Our financial literacy goal this month is to research and make a decision about joining hubby up for kiwi saver. Being self- employed he doesn’t have to make the 2% contributions and some providers don’t require the self-employed to make an initial deposit or any regular contributions. This means we can join up and get the $1000 kick start as well as once a year deposit a lump sum to qualify for the tax credit but in the meantime we can have the money in our bank account keeping the interest down on our revolving mortgage. We already have a super that we started about six years ago which we can access once we are 55 and that we have to regularly contribute to, along with getting employer contributions. It has taken a beating at times over the last two years but the question now for us to work on is what type of portfolio do we want to go with/stay with for us to make the most of any economic recovery that may result over the coming years? There are lots of sources of information in the newspaper and the internet – some of them that we have been using are KiwiSaver Performance Survey – Returns to 30 September 2009 – Good Returns and http://www.sorted.org.nz/home/sorted-sections/kiwisaver.