Each week the NZ Herald's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's what we can learn from how New Zealanders responded to Covid-19. Hosted by Frances Cook.

If you wanted to find out if New Zealanders are financially resilient, then 2020 was one heck of a trial by fire to keep an eye on.

Well the Financial Services Council has done just that, spending the year tracking how we're all doing, in response to one of the most significant challenges of our times.

Some of the results of their Financial Resilience Index are a little surprising.

New Zealanders have stayed reasonably financially confident through the year.

Despite the madness, more of us have decided to give things like investing a try. Which you might think is chaotic timing, but actually makes sense when you think about this year as a wakeup call, and the need to make sure we're looking out for ourselves.

Less good, but also not at all surprising, is the increase in people worrying about job security. That went from 30% of us in March, to almost 50% in both April and August.

Overall money worries also weren't great, with more people saying it was on their mind, and impacting things like their physical and mental health.

So what should we make of all of this information, and is there a way we can guard against the quite reasonable worries?

For the latest podcast I talked to Richard Klipin, CEO of the Financial Services Council.

If you have a question about this podcast, or 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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.