By Ryno Oosthuizen, Business Development Manager at Glacier by Sanlam When investing in a unit trust or share portfolio there are generally two types of returns an investor can expect to earn: income and capital growth. Income earned can be...
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Savings: it’s about a change in mindset
Open up your bank statement and calculate how much of your monthly salary goes to repaying debt. Imagine if, apart from your mortgage, you had no debt repayments – think of all that money now available for savings. The reality is that we have...
How to win the lotto
There are ways to score without playing the odds. Our family has a game where we write down what we would do with our money if we won the lotto. This is not just a fruitless exercise of “what if” because what it does is show us what is important to...
How to avoid buying into hype
When looking at investment opportunities, it isn't always that easy to separate out the sizzle from the steak. What do Bernie Madoff, Barry Tannenbaum and Sharemax have in common? They started as credible organisations run by known people – people...
Financial Therapy
The developing field of "financial therapy" can help us understand the complex dynamics that inform our financial decision-making. Americans love their psychological analysis approach to life. A cursory look at Amazon’s list of top-selling...
High fees, poor disclosure plaguing SA investment industry
The recently published Morningstar Global Fund Investor Experience 2015 study, which analyses 25 countries that offer investment funds, highlights high fees, poor disclosure levels and advisers’ lack of fiduciary duty as some of the key issues...
Tax-free savings accounts are not ideal for an education fund
Using your child’s tax-free savings account is not necessarily the best vehicle for their education fund. Since the launch of the tax-free savings accounts (TFSAs) there have been suggestions that this would be an ideal way to save for your child’s...
What to consider when investing internationally
By Tracy Muller, Head: Fiduciary at Nedbank Private Wealth Individuals are often driven to invest internationally for the wrong reasons, as emotions override financial acumen. They often only consider investing internationally when the rand starts...
The cost of bad habits
People often argue that the reason they don’t have any savings, or why they cannot pay off their debts, is because they simply don’t have enough money. Yet little do we realise how much our bad habits are really costing us. The real cost of smoking...
Retirement annuity tax loophole to be closed
By Tanya Lochner, fiduciary specialist at Glacier by Sanlam In the foreseeable future retirement annuities will no longer fall outside of your estate for estate duty purposes, so bear that in mind when you do your estate planning. Since 2007, a...
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SA obsession with home ownership needs to be “dumbed down” a little
By John Loos, Household and Property Sector Strategist at First National Bank The 5% FNB House Price Index inflation rate suggests no apparent need for “first-time buyer panic” at present. But there is a need for first-time buyer caution, and perhaps a little less...
The impact of debt on our retirement
Debt is the main reason people withdraw their retirement benefits when changing jobs, according to key findings of the 2015 Sanlam Benchmark Survey, a comprehensive annual review of South Africa’s retirement industry. After interviewing thousands of retirement fund...
The impact fees have on your living annuity returns
For most people, cost is a primary consideration in almost every purchase decision. Except, it seems, when it comes to critical financial decisions, such as buying a savings or investment product. Many South African retirement investors therefore also overlook the...
Aggressive investment needed for sufficient retirement outcomes
What levels of real growth are needed for a comfortable retirement outcome? Are retirement funds investing aggressively enough to achieve this? Barend Ritter, Portfolio Manager at Sanlam Investments, takes a stand and makes a case for equities. In order to secure a...
Is life insurance really for life?
The inefficient structure of existing life insurance products impact value and sustainability of cover for clients. BrightRock’s needs-matched life insurance addresses these shortcomings by pricing cover correctly for the term and trajectory required. Since its launch...
Delayed parenting: how to avoid a financial ‘bottleneck’
There may be very good reasons to postpone starting a family, but it’s also important to consider the potential financial implications when you make this call, says Karin Muller, head of Growth Market Solutions at Sanlam. People are delaying having children for...
Intergenerational wealth management
David Leslie, a director of Belmont Asset Management in Cape Town, takes a look at the concept of intergenerational wealth management. Intergenerational wealth management is an approach to wealth management that spans different generations within a family. We often...
Big corporate salaries don’t make you rich
While many professional women earn impressive salaries and contribute towards corporate pension requirements, Citadel Advisory Partner Kirsten Smit says that it's important to build wealth outside your job. Many women believe they can only become as wealthy as their...
The best gift my mother ever gave me
I was fortunate growing up to have a really great mom. She was the kind of person one thinks of when you say “mother”. She was a really involved parent – she made the pom-poms for sports day, sewed pretty dresses for me, came to all the parent-teacher meetings, and...
Am I obliged to leave my estate to my family?
By David Knott of Private Client Trust, the fiduciary services division of Private Client Holdings, and a member of the Fiduciary Institute of South Africa In many countries around the world there are forced heirship laws in place which have evolved over many years of...