Each week the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's how your KiwiSaver is protected, and the limits to that protection. Hosted by Frances Cook.

In a crisis our brains have a fun little quirk, where they tend to go straight to the worst case scenario.

Now this can be a good thing to help you plan for the future and avoid that worst case scenario.

But it’s less helpful for something like KiwiSaver, which most of us know is very important but might get fuzzy around the edges when it comes to understanding the rules.

So I’ve had people sending me worried questions about if their KiwiSaver balance will crash all the way to zero, if the government will confiscate their money if the economy goes bad, or what happens if their KiwiSaver provider goes bust.

The good news is KiwiSaver was set up with lots of protections for exactly these situations.

For the latest Cooking the Books podcast I talked to Public Trust CEO Glenys Talivai.

We discussed how what happens if your KiwiSaver provider goes under, if the government can take your savings, and how the KiwiSaver scheme is supervised.

If you have a question about this podcast, or a question you'd like answered in the next one, come and talk to me about it. I'm on Facebook here https://www.facebook.com/FrancesCookJournalist/ Instagram here https://www.instagram.com/francescooknz/ and Twitter here https://twitter.com/FrancesCook