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Retirement Funds

Mind the gap. Very few retirement funds provide enough money to ensure a financially secure retirement, particularly now that most companies are reducing or discontinuing medical scheme subsidies to retirees. This means you need to have other investments to top up your retirement fund savings. Make sure you check up on how you are managing to fill “the gap” by regularly having a financial needs analysis with a properly qualified financial adviser.

Retirement Funds

At retirement you should consider exercising your option to take as cash up to one-third of your retirement savings from a defined benefit or defined contribution retirement fund or a retirement annuity. There are two reasons for doing this:

When it comes to knowing the basics of economics, such as how banks use money deposited into checking accounts to fund loans and what the nation’s primary source of revenue is, Black students are the most clueless, according to the Nation’s Report Card on Economics.
The assessment result was released last week by the National Assessment Governing Board, an independent board that includes governors, legislators and educators, as part of the board’s annual evaluation on the condition of education in the country.
In the sample of more than 11,000 12^th-graders from both public and private schools across the country, the average score in the basic achievement range of what students should already know about economics and the American economy, Blacks scored the lowest. Read the rest of this entry »

Retirement Funds

If you are a member of a defined benefit or defined contribution retirement fund, or you contribute to a retirement annuity, you can deduct your contributions (limited to pre-determined levels) from your taxable income and defer tax until your retirement years. This way you get to earn investment returns on money that would otherwise have gone to the Receiver of Revenue.

Retirement Funds

The earlier you start a retirement annuity, the greater your tax-free benefit at retirement. You should avoid having too many retirement annuity plans as you could undermine your ability to get the maximum tax-free allowance at retirement.

Life Insurance

As a general rule, you should keep your risk life assurance against death and disability separate from your investments, particularly if the risk assurance is for a long period. The main reason for this is that, if you land up in financial difficulties, you do not want to lose the risk cover because you have had to stop paying the investment portion. This strategy also gives you more flexibility with your investments.