We help you improve your Financial Wellness by:
- Helping you invest your money wisely
- Helping you ensure that you have enough money when you retire
- Helping you convert your assets into a tax-efficient and sustainable income stream when you retire
- Ensuring that you have a well-planned estate and do not pay any unnecessary fees and taxes
- Ensuring that you have a robust will in place
- Protecting your ability to earn an income
- Protecting you from massive medical costs
1. Helping you invest your money wisely
Your investments need to be well structured in order to meet your short-, medium- and long-term goals. We use the following model:
Term | Duration | Investment approach | Max Equity | Targeted Return |
Short | < 2 years | Conservative | 20% | Fixed Income index + 1% |
Medium | 2 to 5 years | Moderate | 50% | Inflation + 4% |
Long | 5 years + | Moderate Aggressive | 75% | Inflation + 6% |
Factors we look at when constructing your investment portfolio include ensuring that:
- It can handle challenging times
- It can take advantage of growth opportunities
- The costs are kept to a minimum
- Any taxes paid are kept to a minimum
- We have the right mix of local and offshore assets.
We make use of financial planning software and one of the packages that we use is asset map. Here is a video which shows how this can help you better understand your finances. Asset Map video
2. Helping you ensure that you have enough money when you retire
We will help you plan for your retirement by doing the following:
- help you calculate how much are you going to need each month when you retire
- help you calculate how much of this monthly amount your current retirement savings will meet
- we will then help you put in place a tax efficient investment plan in order to close this gap.
We make use of special financial planning software and will run various scenarios for you to help you understand the impact of:
- early or late retirement
- the selling of different assets to meet your retirement needs
All of this to help you find that sweet spot where:
- your money will last for the rest of your life
- you pay the least amount of tax
- any estate duty is minimized
We provide benefit counselling to pension and provident funds, as well as run workshops and webinars on retirement planning.
3. Helping you convert your assets into a tax-efficient and sustainable income stream when you retire
When you retire, you need to convert your assets into an income stream. The decisions you make here are very important and can have a major impact on your financial wellness in years to come if you do not get the right structures in place.
We will help you make the right ones in terms of:
- what lump sum to take
- what type of annuity to take
- what portfolios you should be investing in in order to get the best returns at the right level of risk
- how to structure your various investments and drawdowns in order to pay the least amount of income tax
- how to ensure that you do not run out of money
- how to use your retirement funds to avoid paying estate duty
4. Ensuring that you have a well-planned estate and do not pay any unnecessary fees and taxes
When you pass away, your estate will typically pay around R1 million in estate duty for every R5 million in assets that you have. With a bit of planning, this amount is able to be reduced.
By structuring your assets ahead of time, you can ensure that the tax man receives less and your family receives more. I am a co-presenter of a course on estate planning at UCT and am familiar with the many opportunities that exist to reduce this tax.
There are three big costs when you pass away:
- estate duty
- capital gains tax
- executor fees
We will analyse your estate as if you had passed away and calculate these various costs. We then run the numbers and create an action plan to be implemented to reduce these amounts. Just a bit of clever planning can make a massive difference to the financial wellness of your loved ones
5. Ensuring that you have a robust will in place
It is important that you have a solid will in place. There should be no grey areas which could lead to the wrapping up of your estate taking a long time. If you have offshore assets that are not in a structure where beneficiaries are attached, then you should have and offshore will. We can be of assistance here and facilitate the drafting of a robust will for you.
6. Protecting your ability to earn an income
What will happen to you and your family if you are unable to work ever again? You must ensure that you and your family remain on the same financial trajectory that you are currently on even if you are unable to work.
We can put solutions in place that will ensure that you continue to receive an income until you reach retirement, should you not be able to work. You can get this even if you have your own company or earn a living through a number of side gigs/odd jobs.
7. Protecting you from massive medical costs
We are living a lot longer and the chances of getting a serious illness and surviving it are good. The problem here is that it comes at a cost.
Besides the financial impact of not being able to work at full strength while you are sick and recovering, there will also be costs that your medical aid and gap cover do not meet. These costs can be quite large, and I have seen people having to take out additional loans to keep afloat.
There are simple solutions that can easily remove this risk, which we can explore and tailor to your specific scenario.
