offshore investing Archives -

A case for higher offshore weighting within a living annuity?

There is this strange phenomenon in SA called Regulation 28 that is applied to retirement funds. It stipulates that retirement fund members may not have more than 75% of their funds in equities and no more than 25% of the fund invested offshore

Normal service has resumed

I found myself facing a crisis recently. I have always promised clients that I would only invest their funds where I myself am prepared to invest for myself and my family and yet with the recent shenanigans from our president who saw fit to remove the finance minister, I found myself at a cross roads. …

Is everyone thinking it but no one prepared to say it?

What if SA is where Zimbabwe was ±20-25 years ago? With the benefit of hindsight, what would the average Zimbabwean do differently? Would they have stopped investing into their pension funds and bought more foreign currency? Would they have emigrated? Would they have bonded their houses to the hilt and taken the funds offshore? I …

Dont panic – plan!

There are essentially 2 emotions that drive human behaviour when it comes to money: fear and greed. Both of them can result in investors behaving irrationally and this can result is significant financial losses if we are not careful. For many South Africans there is currently a lot of fear around the future – it …

What’s up with SARS and tax clearance certificates?

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 …

Push-me-pull-you

I remember, as a kid, reading about Doctor Dolittle and the fantastic “pushmi-pullyu” a gazelle-unicorn cross with two heads (one of each) at opposite ends of its body. Whenever it tried to move, both heads went in opposite directions and as a result it went nowhere. I had to apply for a tax clearance for …

Is that your final offer?

Mostly, I love what I do – helping people to manage their money better. Yesterday I was reminded again of the value that we can add to people’s lives… A client called me about a forex transaction that she was busy with to see if I thought the rate that the bank was offering her …

Lessons from Enron (and the strong rand)

One of the really difficult parts of dealing with people and their money is having to give them bad news about the performance of the funds in which they are invested. They usually react badly and look for all sorts of people to blame (most often this the advisor). Behavioral Finance psychologists tell us that …

Is there still a case for investing offshore?

Just over 10 years ago when I left the corporate world I put my pension fund into a preservation fund…and the R23000 odd that I invested then is worth about R23000 today…what happened? One of the important principles in life (and financial planning) is this: each time you make an important decision write down the …

The Financial Coach