Good: creating a website that compares Kiwisaver options
Great: Getting coverage in the SST for your website
Not so great: being not “available to the public” when the article is published
Down right silly: charging $30 for the privilege of looking at your site, when you can get the information for free elsewhere, and when someone else can do what you are doing pretty easily and support it by advertising. But there may be enough fools out there.
Lance Wiggs 
Well, they say any publicity is good publicity! It’s always interesting to read others perceptions of what we are providing. I’m not trying to turn your blog into an advertisement, however I do feel I need to correct some misconceptions.
The focus of our site is not on providing calculators and walls of text about KiwiSaver, we are well aware that you can find those in a number of other places. Our goal is to provide our customers with a complete list of all KiwiSaver schemes on offer, complete with information about fees, asset allocation, and most importantly their performance. I challenge you to find that information gathered together elsewhere. Sure, each site provides their own statistics, slanted in a way to make them appear best. But ask them to publish direct comparisons with other funds and they suddenly seem very shy.
SmartKiwiSaver is a pay site for two main reasons. Firstly, because all our costs are covered by a subscription fee, we are not influenced by the sources of our advertising revenue, and can provide a clear, independent and unbiased picture. Secondly, we provide the same facility as a financial advisor – we personally answer our users questions about KiwiSaver. You won’t find that level of service on a free site.
Andrew Smith
http://www.smartkiwisaver.co.nz
LikeLike
Andrews right, you won’t find that level of support on a free site, the service will be better!! I joined up http://www.smartkiwisaver.co.nz and the service is appalling. I’ve emailed them a number of times with questions and never heard back. I had to email the company directly as when I had problems with the site as the email support/question submission facility was also broken. In additon I can’t even log in any more as I can’t reset my password. The message ‘While your entered details are valid, there was a problem processing your password reset. Please try again in a few minutes, and if it still doesn’t work, please email support’ appears. This also hasn’t worked for months! I am now emailing Andrew personally and we’ll see how it goes. The reason I found this site and posted this was I was worried the whole thing was a scam as they have my credit card details! When I could log in the level of information is crap – they have very little historic information and there is no excuse as you can go to other free sites and get better information. In a nutshell stay away!
LikeLike
We have now revamped the site.We offer a free site with limited information so you can see what you are getting before you sign up for the full package, for a whole $29.90 incl GST per year!
In July 2008 kiwisaver was one year old so of course there was little historical data.
There seems to be little appreciation of costs involved in programming IT, collating information on fees, asset allocation, performance, volatility measurements and most of all reconciling price data with providers when they do actually provide the data. A lot of the price data is just simply refused, ask any other research houses, journalist, and anyone else attempting to extract performance data.
It is no wonder those providing “free information” are few and far between unless you think that by going to a providers site you will get unbias information. Providers who do this are only too happy to provide ‘free’ performance data for obvious reasons. There are any number of ways data can be manipulated.
We have introduced a email system which allows users to email providers to encourage the disclosure of performance data to smartkiwisaver.We have as much data as anyone else possibly more.
Those sites who provide free simple fee comparisons are next to useless, because fees are only a small part of the decision making process.
Our apologies to anyone who has not had a reply from us when an attempt thru the website has been made. Try subscribing again and if you are disatisfied email me personally. Because of the low cost of membership we only offer an email service.
Phil Harris
Director
Trident Research.
LikeLike