Privacy Policy

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]

The Information Officer responsible for personal information at Lifestyle Calculator is:

• Information Officer: [not yet configured]
• Email: [not yet configured]
• Telephone: [not yet configured]
• Deputy Information Officer: [not yet configured]

The company has designated an Information Officer responsible for privacy and personal-information matters. Registration of the Information Officer with the Information Regulator (South Africa) has not yet been completed, and we make no claim that it has.

Questions about this policy, or any request relating to your personal information, 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 "Import your current budget" feature: budget spreadsheets (Excel/CSV), photographs, screenshots and PDF documents of a budget, and the budget lines read from them. We do not accept or process bank statements, and we never ask for banking login details, passwords, PINs or card security codes.
• 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.
• Website and product usage information (first-party only): an anonymous, randomly generated visit identifier held in your own browser, the pages you open, the referring website's domain, campaign tags (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term) present in the link you arrived on, whether the device is a phone, tablet or computer, and simple milestones such as starting or completing a calculation. The visit identifier is stored in one-way hashed form on our side. No financial figures, names, email addresses, IP addresses or browser user-agent strings are stored for usage statistics, and the statistics are only ever viewed as aggregated totals by an administrator.

We do not operate a third-party analytics or advertising tracker on the site (no Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, PostHog, Mixpanel or similar). Our usage statistics are first-party only and stay inside our own hosting. Advertising performance figures are entered manually by us from advertising platform reports and are not linked to any individual. Usage records are kept for up to 400 days and then deleted.

2A. Using the calculator without an account (guest mode)

You may use the calculator without creating an account. In guest mode we do not ask for your name, email address, cellphone number, identity number or address, and we do not create a profile for you.

What happens to the figures you enter as a guest:

• Your figures (income, expenses, savings, assets, debt and goals) are stored in your own web browser's local storage on your own device. They are not written to our database and they are not linked to an identifiable person.
• Those figures are never written to browser storage: they are dropped when you reload or leave the calculator, after 1 hour of inactivity, and immediately when you choose "Clear my temporary data" or "Start again".
• Calculations run in your browser. If any figure ever needs to be sent to our servers for a feature you choose to use, that processing is temporary and is not saved to a guest profile.
• Documents are not uploaded or processed in guest mode; the import feature is only available to registered users.

What we do keep on our servers for guest use:

• An anonymous counter so the three free calculations can be enforced. It holds a randomly generated session identifier and a one-way hashed network identifier, the number of calculations completed, and timestamps. It contains no name, contact detail, financial figure or account link, and the rows are deleted automatically after 30 days.
• Standard security and hosting records (for example rate-limiting and error information), as described elsewhere in this policy.

Guest use does not appear as a client anywhere in our administration console; only aggregated, anonymous totals are visible to us. Guest information is not used for marketing, e-mail campaigns or profiling.

If you later create an account, your temporary guest figures are only copied into your account if you are signed in and expressly choose "Save my guest calculation". If you do not choose that, they stay temporary and are cleared.

Information belonging to registered users is handled as described in the rest of this policy, and is stored in our database subject to access controls and retention periods.

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 budget 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).

The third-party services (operators) that process personal information on our behalf are:

• [not yet configured] — the current list of third-party service providers is maintained in our internal privacy register and will be published here.

Where your information is stored: our hosted database, authentication service and application servers store personal information in a data centre in the European Union (Amazon Web Services, Ireland, region eu-west-1). Your account details, the figures you capture, your support requests, your enquiries and your privacy requests are therefore stored outside South Africa.

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, and we record the data-processing arrangement we rely on in the list above.

Cross-border processing is relied on because the platforms we use to run the service are hosted internationally. Where a transfer is made, we rely on the recipient being subject to laws or binding agreements that give effect to principles for the lawful processing of personal information that are substantially similar to POPIA, together with the operator terms recorded in the list above. Any arrangement still marked as requiring confirmation is exactly that, and we do not claim otherwise.

5. Uploaded budget documents

The "Import your current budget" feature accepts a budget only: a spreadsheet (Excel/CSV) or a photograph, screenshot or PDF of a budget. Bank statements are not supported and are rejected by the system. We describe the actual behaviour honestly:

• Spreadsheets (Excel/CSV) are read in your own browser. The file itself is never sent to our servers.
• Photographs, screenshots and PDF documents are sent to our server and passed to an AI document-reading service that reads the budget lines. This happens while you wait.
• We do not keep a copy of the uploaded file after processing. We do not operate a document storage bucket for these uploads.
• What is saved is only 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.
• We never ask for and must never receive banking login details, passwords, PINs, card security codes or one-time passwords. Please remove account numbers and other sensitive details before uploading anything.
• 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.

If you would rather not upload anything, 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.

Administrator access is role-based and enforced at database level, not in the browser:

• Full administrators can view client records in a read-only management console in order to operate, support and improve the service. They cannot change or delete the figures you have captured.
• Support administrators can see only your contact details and your support requests. They cannot see your income, expenses, debts, assets, scores or projections.
• Every privileged view of client information, and every change to privacy settings or a data request, is recorded in an internal audit log together with the administrator's identity and the date and time. Administrators cannot edit or delete audit records from the application.
• Administrator accounts must use two-step verification with an authenticator app. Administrator server functions verify both the role and the second factor before returning any client information.
• Service credentials and API keys are held server-side only and are never exposed to the browser.
• Sign-in uses email confirmation for new accounts, screening of passwords that are known to have been exposed in public breaches, and optional passkey or biometric sign-in on supported devices. Anonymous sign-in is disabled.
• Our public forms (PAIA requests, Information Officer requests and sign-up reminders) are rate limited per device to prevent abuse. We store only a salted, one-way fingerprint for that purpose, not your IP address in readable form.
• Automated daily backups of the database are taken by our hosting platform and are encrypted at rest.

Further technical and organisational safeguards are reviewed on an ongoing basis.

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.
• Account and financial records: 60 months after your account becomes inactive or is closed, unless the law requires longer.
• Support requests, complaints and data requests: 60 months.
• Financial Help enquiries and the record of what was shared with a provider: 36 months.

Records are kept only for as long as reasonably necessary for the service, account administration, legitimate operational purposes and legal or regulatory requirements.

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 from Profile → Privacy & data inside the app, on the Your Data Rights page, or by contacting the Information Officer at [not yet configured]. 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.

20. Our privacy commitment

Lifestyle Calculator is committed to protecting personal information and complying with applicable South African privacy and information-access requirements, including POPIA and PAIA.

Information Officer: [not yet configured] ([not yet configured], [not yet configured]). Registration status: The company has designated an Information Officer responsible for privacy and personal-information matters. Registration of the Information Officer with the Information Regulator (South Africa) has not yet been completed, and we make no claim that it has.. Registration details can be verified with the Information Regulator at https://inforegulator.org.za/.

You can contact the Information Officer directly, without an account, using the Contact Information Officer form on this website.

21. Financial information you should never send us

Lifestyle Calculator is a budgeting and planning tool. We do not need, ask for, or want your banking credentials.

• Do not upload bank statements. Our import feature accepts only budget summaries (CSV, Excel or a photo of a written budget).
• Never send us account numbers, card numbers, CVV codes, PINs, one-time passwords or online banking usernames and passwords.
• We will never phone, email or message you to ask for banking login details, and we will never ask you to make a payment to an adviser through us.
• If you receive a message claiming to be from Lifestyle Calculator asking for any of the above, treat it as fraudulent and report it to the Information Officer.

We deliberately collect the minimum financial information needed for the calculations: totals and categories you type in yourself, not transaction-level bank data.

22. Security safeguards

We apply reasonable technical and organisational safeguards appropriate to the nature of the information, including encrypted transport (HTTPS), encryption at rest with our hosting providers, row-level database access rules so that your records are only readable by your own account, role-based administrator access, and an immutable audit log of administrator activity.

Administrator access is limited to what each role needs. Support administrators can see contact details and enquiries only. Full financial records are accessible only to a super administrator, and every such access is written to the audit log.

No system can be guaranteed to be completely secure. You are responsible for keeping your own password and device secure and for signing out of shared devices.

23. Security compromises and breach notification

We keep an internal register of security incidents. If we have reasonable grounds to believe that your personal information has been accessed or acquired by an unauthorised person, we will, as soon as reasonably possible after discovering and containing the compromise:

• notify the Information Regulator; and
• notify you in writing at the email address on your account, describing what happened, the information involved, the likely consequences and the steps we and you can take to reduce the risk.

We will not delay notification unnecessarily, and we will only delay where a public body tells us that notification would impede a criminal investigation.

24. Closing your account and deleting your data

You can ask us to close your account and delete your information at any time, from your Profile page or through the Contact Information Officer form.

• We acknowledge the request and confirm your identity where necessary.
• Your account and the financial records linked to it are deleted or irreversibly de-identified.
• Records we are required by law to keep, and records needed for an existing legal dispute, are retained for the applicable statutory period and then deleted.
• Where you asked us to share your details with a product provider before closing your account, that provider becomes responsible for the copy it holds, and you should contact it directly.

Retention periods: account records 60 months, support records 60 months, enquiry and referral records 36 months.

Guest (no-account) use: temporary figures are held only in your own browser for the active session, discarded on reload or after 1 hour of inactivity, and can be cleared by you at any time; the anonymous free-use counter on our servers is deleted automatically after 30 days.

25. Cross-border processing

Some of our service providers process information outside South Africa. We only use providers that undertake to protect information at a level comparable to POPIA, and we share the minimum information needed for the service.

• [not yet configured] — the current list of third-party service providers is maintained in our internal privacy register and will be published here.