1. Who processes your information
The responsible party for the personal information processed through this website is:
- Legal entity: [TO BE CONFIRMED BY THE BUSINESS]
- Trading as: Lifestyle Calculator
- Company registration number: [TO BE CONFIRMED BY THE BUSINESS]
- Registered address: [TO BE CONFIRMED BY THE BUSINESS]
- Email: [TO BE CONFIRMED BY THE BUSINESS]
- Telephone: [TO BE CONFIRMED BY THE BUSINESS]
- Information Officer: [TO BE CONFIRMED BY THE BUSINESS]
Questions about this policy can be sent to the Information Officer at the address above.
2. What personal information we collect
We only collect what you give us or what the website needs to work. Depending on how you use the calculator, this may include:
- Identity and contact information: full name, preferred name, email address, cellphone number, alternative contact number, username.
- Personal details you choose to enter: date of birth or age, gender, household status, number of dependants, province, city, residential address and postal address.
- Identity or passport information: we do not currently ask for this. If it is ever collected, this policy will be updated first.
- Financial information: income, expenses, savings and investments, retirement funds, debts and loan balances, interest rates, repayments, property values, rental income and property costs, other assets, financial goals and target retirement age.
- Documents you upload through the "Upload / scan my finances" feature: bank statements, spreadsheets (Excel/CSV), photographs, screenshots and PDF documents, and the transaction information extracted from them.
- Support information: the content of support requests, complaints, data requests and any information you include in them.
- Technical information: your login session, the device and browser used to sign in, and basic security and error information generated by our hosting and error-reporting infrastructure.
- Cookies and similar storage: see the Cookie Policy. We currently use authentication/session storage that is essential to keep you signed in. We do not currently run advertising or marketing cookies.
We do not currently operate a third-party analytics or advertising tracker on the site. If that changes, this policy and the Cookie Policy will be updated before the tracker is switched on.
3. Why we process your information and on what basis
- To create and secure your account and to sign you in.
- To perform the calculations, scores, benchmarks, projections and scenarios that are the purpose of the service — this is necessary to perform our agreement with you.
- To read documents you choose to upload, so that your figures are captured faster.
- To respond to support requests, complaints and data requests, and to keep a record of them.
- To keep the service secure, prevent abuse and diagnose technical faults — our legitimate interest.
- To comply with legal obligations that apply to us.
Where the law requires your consent (for example for optional communications or optional processing), we ask for that consent separately and you may withdraw it.
4. Who your information may be shared with
We do not sell your personal information. We share it only where it is necessary:
- Our hosting, database and authentication providers, which store your account and financial records on our behalf.
- The artificial-intelligence document-reading provider used when you upload a statement, photo or PDF (see the Financial Document and AI sections below).
- Support and communication tools used to answer your requests.
- Professional advisers, auditors or regulators where we are legally required or permitted to disclose.
- A financial adviser or other professional, only where you ask us to refer you and only with the information relevant to that referral (see Adviser Referrals).
Some of these providers process information outside South Africa. Where that happens, we must satisfy ourselves that the transfer meets the requirements of section 72 of POPIA. The current list of processors and the countries involved is: [TO BE CONFIRMED BY THE BUSINESS] — this will be confirmed and published before launch.
5. Uploaded bank statements and financial documents
Documents uploaded through "Upload / scan my finances" may contain highly sensitive information such as account numbers, balances, salary details and the identity of the people and businesses you transact with. We describe the actual behaviour of the system honestly:
- Spreadsheets (Excel/CSV) are read in your own browser. The file itself is not sent to our servers; only the transaction rows needed for classification are.
- Photographs, screenshots and PDF documents are sent to our server and passed to an AI document-reading service that extracts the transactions. This happens while you wait.
- We do not currently keep a copy of the uploaded file after processing. We do not operate a document storage bucket for these uploads.
- What is saved is what you confirm on the review screen: the income, expense, savings and debt figures you choose to import. Those figures are stored in your account until you change or delete them.
- The AI provider processes the document on our instruction as an operator. Retention by that provider is governed by its own terms; the confirmed provider name, terms and retention period are [TO BE CONFIRMED BY THE BUSINESS].
- Access to your stored figures is restricted to your own signed-in account through database access rules, and to authorised administrators who need access to operate or support the service.
We do not claim that uploaded documents are encrypted end-to-end, permanently deleted from every system, or never seen by a third party. Where you are uncomfortable with document upload, enter your figures manually instead — the calculator works exactly the same way.
6. Security
We use the access controls provided by our hosting and database platform, including per-user database access rules so that your records are only readable by your own account, and encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS) between your device and our servers.
No online service can be guaranteed to be completely secure. Please use a strong, unique password and tell us immediately if you believe your account has been accessed without your permission.
7. How long we keep your information
- Account and financial records: for as long as your account is active, and thereafter for as long as we are legally required or permitted to keep them.
- Support requests and complaints: retained as a record of the interaction.
- Uploaded documents: not retained after processing, as described above.
The confirmed retention schedule for each record type is [TO BE CONFIRMED BY THE BUSINESS].
8. Your rights
Under POPIA you may ask us to confirm what information we hold about you, request access to it, ask us to correct or update it, ask us to delete or destroy it where the law allows, object to processing in certain circumstances, and withdraw consent where processing was based on consent.
You can exercise these rights on the Your Data Rights page, or by contacting the Information Officer. You may also complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa). Complaint and PAIA request contact details for the Information Regulator must be confirmed against the Regulator's published details before launch.
9. Children
The service is intended for adults. We do not knowingly create accounts for children under 18 without the consent of a competent person.
10. Changes to this policy
When this policy changes materially we update the version number and effective date shown at the top of this page, and where appropriate we ask you to acknowledge the new version when you next sign in.