But not for long…
If you are looking for income from your cash then the RSA Retail Bond (2 year fixed-rate option) is still offering 8% – that’s about the best “guaranteed” option available. But that rate is likely to fall by about 0.5% at the beginning of December (the repo rate was cut by 0.5% to 5.5% last week).
To qualify for the 8% rate you need to have invested the money with them before the end of November, so you still have about 1 week to go.
On an amount of R500000, the difference between 8% and 7.5% is about R208 per month…that’s about 13 cappuccinos or about 26 litres of petrol…worth getting a move on in my opinion.
I don’t think I would go for the 3 year option at this stage…it is quite a long time and rates are likely to start increasing again sometime in the not too distant future. With the 2 year option, you at least have the option to increase (re-start) your bond after 1 year…so if rates have increased in the next year you can participate in that increase. I guess the only risk with the 2 year option is that rates fall a bit more in the next 2 years and are still lower by the time you need to re-invest your bond but looking at all the yield curves this looks highly unlikely.
Thanks to Atlantic Asset Management for the help on forward rates.
