Latest News & Developments
Take advantage of tax benefits attached to retirement savings and medical aid contribution.
According to Asisa, payments made to policyholders and beneficiaries included retirement annuity and endowment policy benefits.
Reaching management control and employment equity targets remained a challenge for an industry dependent on scarce specialised skills such as actuarial and asset management expertise.
South African life insurers and investment companies detected 8,931 cases of fraud and dishonesty in 2022. While losses worth R1. 1 billion were prevented, the industry lost R77 million to fraud in 2022.
Investing for an income is what you do, for example, when buying a life annuity with your retirement savings. You aren’t investing for some long-term accumulation goal; you are putting your money in an investment that will hopefully give you a sustainable return from which you can withdraw at regular intervals for your day-to-day living expenses.
The percentage of accumulated savings that a retiree withdraws annually to live on, known in the retirement industry as the “drawdown rate”, has long been a subject of concern. A large proportion of retirees with living annuities are drawing too much each year for their retirement capital to sustain them if they live to their late eighties or early nineties. To put it bluntly, they are likely to run out of money before running out of life.
Our local collective investment industry attracts many of our brightest minds and boasts a level of sophistication and expertise to match the best in the world. I have always marvelled at this, considering how few South Africans consciously save.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about living annuities, with the message – supported by expert opinion – that living-annuity pensioners need to be able to cope with stock-market volatility if they are drawing more than 4% a year for an income. The argument was that only by being heavily invested in equities (at least 60%) could you achieve the after-inflation returns required to sustain that level of income over the long term.
The past weekend’s Comrades Marathon is described as the ultimate human race. The annual event is a run approximately 90km between Durban and Pietermaritzburg and is considered the world's oldest ultra-marathon. Stuart Green, Analyst, Multi-Manager Solutions, at Platinum Portfolios, a boutique fund management company, looks at the similarities between the marathon and fund management.
The research shows that Financial strains have prompted many South Africans to stop paying their risk insurance premiums and cash in their investment policies. In fact, 1Life stats reveal that in 2022, the non-payment of premiums increased by 3% each month and up to 17% in December 2022 compared to December 2021. Furthermore, Asisa statistics show that 689-888 recurring and single premium savings policies were surrendered in 2022, in South Africa.