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...

I attended the launch presentation of ETFSA towards the end of November. Exchange traded funds are increasing in popularity both globally as well as locally so I thought I had better find out more. ETFSA is an investment platform which provides access to all the ETF’s in SA and also plans to make a an ETF retirement annuity an option. While I can see the role that ETF’s can play in an investor’s portfolio there are a few misquoted...

Ok, so almost everyone accepts that a unit trust RA is currently the best retirement annuity available in SA…(for reasons of cost, transparency and most importantly, flexibility). And while government is (apparently) intent on encouraging retirement savings, it seems that they really are only paying lip service to the issue because you can only access a unit trust RA if you are well-heeled. The very people who so...

Following on from my post last week about direct insurers being so much more expensive than normal insurance companies (even at full commission) I thought I would get a few quotes from them. I asked for R1million life cover for a 44 year old male, non-smoker, top income and health bracket and this is what we got back. We also tried to compare apples with apples and so the premium escalation structure is a simialr as we could get...

Following on from the first post on RSA Retail Bonds, I received a reply from the communications manager at National Treasury who referred me to 2 more people and I finally received a 10 page summary on the bonds. The first section is titled “How to invest” and answers the questions we had but is unfortunately not available on the website (yet)! Turns out though, that if you want to invest via the website you need to...

Just read an article online about how in these tough times one of the positive outcomes is that people seem to be investing more into their retirement funds. The bad news, though, is that it is still usually too little to enable most people to retire financially secure. Of bigger concern for me, however, is that not only are most people contributing too little, but on top of this, most people are probably not taking enough risk on their...