Conventional wisdom holds that 9 out of 10 (South Africans) will not be able to retire financially independent. I have never actually seen the research that underlies these figures – most of them seem to emanate from the insurance and asset management companies. Depending on which (marketing) material you read the number might differ slightly but they all agree on this – most of us won’t be able to afford the “best years of our...

On the same day that Trevor Manuel was quoted in the news about the debt trap that South Africans are facing (http://www.fin24.com/Economy/Manuel-Too-many-caught-in-debt-trap-20111103) I found a flyer on my car offering me a loan of anything from R3000 to R100000. The flyer stated that “Government Employees and Private Sector are welcome. Garnish (sic) and blacklisted welcome. Salary must be paid into bank account.” All you need to...

About 2 weeks ago I was sent a link on you tube which contained the (now famous) interview between the BBC and Alessio Rastani http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC19fEqR5bA where he was predicting the imminent collapse of the financial markets (and I guess the global financial system as we know it as well). When I first viewed the clip it had around 16000 hits and I have just received it again (from another client) and it now has almost...

Eye witness news recently ran a story that stated that according to at least one homeless shelter, it is currently the middle class who are most vulnerable to ending up on the streets. The journalist had interviewed quite a few (recently) homeless people and discovered that they were previously middle class but had all suddenly fallen on hard times due to retrenchment/job loss and as a result ended up on the streets (or in informal...

I have written about this before but the issue has come to the fore again when I recently applied for a tax clearance certificate for offshore investing on behalf of a client. On the face of it, exchange control legislation has all but fallen away with the announcement by National Treasury that individual investors can take R4million offshore each year. But it seems that someone at Treasury forgot to tell SARS that it is ok for people to...

Have been busy with a death claim on a retirement annuity and have managed to get an extra 50% added to the payout value…read on for the details that once again highlight the value that a financial planner can add to a client’s portfolio. About a month before our client died we sat with him and his wife to work through all his insurances (he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer). We did not do a lot of his old policies but...

…in my opinion at least! I cant understand the motivation behind treasury and the FSB’s latest (very zealous) implementation of the regulation 28 rules that apply to retirement funds. These rules have a whole host of unintended consequences, not least of which, will probably be that RA’s are no longer used as savings vehicles and especially by younger people. First a brief bit of background: The Prudential Investment Guidelines...