Who should you select as an executor and what happens to your retirement funds when you die? Maya (@mayaonmoney) and Mapalo (@womanandfinance) unpack what you need to consider when writing up your will. Further reading: What should you...
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Your retirement benefits may not end up where you plan
If you are formally employed you might have been required to join your company’s contracted retirement scheme, and they would have asked you to nominate a beneficiary for the proceeds in case you die before retirement. However, if you chose a...
Beware of your financial adviser asking you to move your investments
It is not uncommon for investors to move their investments from one insurer or asset manager to another. Whether it is because of the promise of better returns, to lower costs or just not being happy with the current company, investors do move...
Sticking to those financial resolutions in the New Year
On New Year’s eve, particularly after a few drinks, we make promises to ourselves that we have every intention of keeping. But time and again we fall short of sticking to these resolutions and just a few short weeks later, they’re forgotten. This...
Robo-advice drives down investment costs
I recently came across the Nedgroup ‘robo-advice’ site, called Extraordinary Life. This new functionality from the Nedgroup investment house has not been widely advertised, and I suspect they are doing a ‘soft’ launch to test the channel first. The...
Afraid to ask your adviser about fees? That’s weird.
By Emma Heap, Chief Growth Officer, 10X Investments Even if you feel a tinge of anxiety each time you see another news report about the damage high fees have done to someone’s retirement plans, you remind yourself that your financial adviser is an...
Is free retirement counselling really free?
What Retirement Benefits Counselling would mean to retirement fund members and the financial advice industry. For years I have been calling on the retirement fund industry to provide financial education to their members. This is a...
Godparent vs Guardian: debunking the myths
By David Thomson, Senior Legal Adviser at Sanlam Trust Whether you are a godparent or you’ve asked someone else to be your child’s godparent, do you have clarity on what the term actually means? There is a critical difference between a godparent...
Millennials: it’s time to wake up
Forget retirement and start thinking out of the box! The latest Sanlam Benchmark Survey on retirement reveals that the average retirement savings balance for a person of the age of 37 is only R90 000, and the average for millennials (people between...
Student loan or home loan?
A reader recently wrote in, asking whether it would be better to pay for her child's university education from her access bond, or to take out a student loan. A student loan can be very cost effective and in most cases, you would be paying around...
Previous Articles
Is retirement even possible?
I recently had a very interesting conversation with Lourens Coetzee of investment company Marriott, who said that the industry is coming to the realisation that retirement, in the way that we currently understand the concept, is no longer feasible. As we start to live...
Six key take-aways from Warren Buffett’s 2017 annual letter to shareholders
There is always a frenzy to devour and dissect Warren Buffett’s shareholder letter and extract the freshest pearls of wisdom. This year was no exception, even though the pickings seemed a bit slim. On more leisurely reading, says Steven Nathan, 10X Investment chief...
Your 12-month financial plan
If you’ve decided that 2018 is the time to get your finances under control, try this month-by-month plan so that your finances and admin are all up-to-date by the end of the year. January: Update your budget and plan for expenses Write up a budget. Don’t just guess...
Divorcing from the breadwinner
Sunel Veldtman, financial planner and founder of Foundation Family Wealth shares her advice to ex-spouses who have made career sacrifices for their family. Too many times I’ve sat across the table from a sobbing woman going through a divorce. Divorce is always...
Is university still relevant to generation Z?
How do we prepare our children, and our finances, for the fourth industrial revolution? I was chatting to a couple of financial planners about how clients save for their children’s tertiary education. It was no surprise to discover that most people are completely...
Get fit and pay for your child’s university fees
Discovery Life has launched a Global Education Protector policy which could help fund your children’s education costs. Education is expensive. Currently, average tuition fees across public primary schools sits at around R20,000 per annum while the private schooling...
The simple truth about investing
In late August I attended the Allan Gray Investment Summit which brought together a range of investment professionals. Most of the day was dedicated to experts discussing investment strategies and their top share picks. But it was the final speaker of the day, Morgan...
Common mistakes when drafting a Will and how they impact your wishes
By Kezia Talbot, Legal Advisor and Remay de Kock, Legal Adviser at BDO SA. It is officially National Wills Week. Wills can get quite tricky – there are several common mistakes that are made when drafting a Will that can have a serious impact on your wishes. One of the...
Investing in retirement
Finding a balance between market returns and a guaranteed income in retirement When you retire from a pension fund or a retirement annuity fund, you are only allowed to take one-third of the value of your fund in cash; the remaining two-thirds must be invested into an...
Time to put on our big-girl panties
Women remain financially vulnerable, and it’s time we did something about it. I was reading recently that women are tired of being spoken to differently about finances – treated as if they are different from men. This is an important point. There is nothing that...