A Penny Saved

I received an email from a PR man for Nationwide announcing their newly launched RetirAbility tool. It’s an interactive tool that take some information about you and your money and returns a score, called an R-Score. The R-Score is a numeric value that represents the % of money that you will have to maintain your current lifestyle. The higher the number the more prepared you will be for retirement. As always, my interest piqued, and I had to give it a try.

Let me say first that if you have a slow internet connection like I do, it’s going to take a lot longer than the estimated 5-10 minutes. All of the content is flash and takes a bit to load. If you are going to test it on a slower connection, make sure and right click on the new window and select a lower quality. It helps. Oh, and you’ll need at least Flash player 8 to run. It’ll let you know if you don’t have it though.

After you get going, you’ll notice that there are avatars that talk you through the process. Again, the content is nice but if you’ve got a slow connection, look out.

I was able to get past the first avatar, and enter in the basic info like my age, salary, and expected retirment. Based on your answers, you may or may not see a different avatar. Mostly, I think this is based on your age. I got one that told me that the tool was only intended for people 35 and older. You can play along and pretend you’re 35 though.

That’s as far as I made it however. Every time that I tried to get any further, the tool stopped and didn’t seem to load any further. Perhaps this was in connection to my internet speed, or maybe the tool has a few flaws? I don’t know, but I lost patience and quit trying.

If anyone else has any better luck(and a fast connection) please let me know. It looks like it could be a valuable tool, but I just had no luck with it.

UPDATE: I managed to get it to work and finished the tools calculations.  You can get a pretty good estimate by guessing on a few things, but you might want a pretty close estimate of debt, assets, and your housing mortgage information if you have it.  After all was said and done, there was some great info in there and they add tips in after each tip which is nice.  I had to pretend to be 35 which is 8 years off, but I still got a 64 which is better than I thought I would have done.  I figure with the extra 8 years, that might up it to about a 75 or so.  Still plenty to do, but a good start nonetheless.

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