The Financial Coach

MANAGING PEOPLE AND THEIR EMOTIONS AROUND MONEY

SARS – touching lives negatively

Just received a revised assessment from SARS for a client for the 2014 tax year, disallowing her retirement annuity contribution and thus resulting in a revised assessment and penalties!!!

Does this make sense?

Was doing provisional tax calculations for a client and was wondering about the effectiveness of her using an RA to reduce her tax liability. She does not belong to a pension fund and all her income is therefore “non-retirement funding”. As such she could put 15% of this into an RA before the end of …

Talk is cheap!

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 …

It’s a (green) jungle out there

Successive consultants and managers have struggled to see my resistance to support Old Mutual when looking for solutions for clients. They have repeatedly tried to sell me the “company line” – 165 years of experience, solid big company etc etc etc… I dont care, I just dont trust them to do what is in the …

Appropriate advice?

Consider the following – what would you advise the client? Client A took out an insurance based RA in 2003 (23 year term). She started a debit order of R450 pm (escalating at 10% pa). The current fund value is R63500 The company claims a return of 11.8% pa on the funds but the maths …