All you should know about retirement
Your retirement is bound to be a stressful time as you tackle a big emotional hurdle. Walking out the door for the last time, you will have your hands full because there is much to do, including making a substantial psychological leap.
When you reach the point of decision at retirement, it’s easy to panic. You must decide how to invest a large amount of money to ensure that you will receive an income for the rest of your, your spouse, or your partner’s lives. And it is unlikely that you have been prepared for this.
Many people who attend my retirement education courses ask how they can ensure that their pension will go to their spouse, or partner if they pass away first.
When you retire from a retirement fund - be it a pension, provident or retirement annuity fund - you may take some of the money out in cash. Pension and retirement annuity funds allow you to withdraw up to one third of the value in cash, while provident funds permit you to take the full value in cash - unless you want to invest any part of the money in a pension or annuity. Preservation pension and provident funds are subject to the same rules as ordinary pension and provident funds.
Some years ago, a friend who had just retired called me on his first day out of work. He didn’t have a clue as to what to do. What made it seem even more urgent was that he called me at 5 o’clock in the morning. He had been a director of a public company and I had always thought that he was extremely well organised. Turns out that he wasn’t. He was completely at a loss.
There is a general concern that people approaching retirement won’t have enough capital to fund a living standard adequate to their needs. What is often forgotten is that retirement carries a double whammy in that ageing is combined with financial considerations. We are all getting older; and it’s like sitting on a conveyor belt, being carried along. Though the ageing process is relentless, the trick to getting older is to embrace it without fear.
People approaching retirement are often concerned about whether the income they can expect from their investments will provide them with a similar living standard to the one they enjoyed before retiring. Not being sure of how to take stock of the situation means that it is mostly ignored.
Choosing the right pension for your retirement is a serious decision. These products are complex and require proper research.
The short answer is yes! However, there is more to this than meets the eye. Over the course of a lifetime, people can collect many bits and pieces of retirement funds that are lodged in various places. Preservation funds came into being in South Africa in 1989. They were intended as a safe haven for the money that became available from pension and/or provident funds when someone resigned from their job.
Employer pension and provident funds (employer retirement funds) differ from retirement annuities and preservation funds in how they process retiring members. The principles are the same, but the employer retirement funds tend to have more formal processes. In this article we detail the employer processes first and then discuss the practical differences as they relate to retirement annuities and preservation funds.
In an earlier article, I showed a method for working out what the after-tax cost of your living standard is before you retire. Comparing this rand value to the after-tax value of the retirement income that you can anticipate from your retirement investments gives you a good guide to what your retirement budget will be and how close it will come to your present living standard.
People talk a lot about investment costs these days when they refer to unit trusts, endowment policies, retirement annuity funds and retirement funds. Financial services professionals’ talk about costs and often tell you: “Pay peanuts and you get monkeys.” “Look at everything else first” they say, “and worry about costs last.”
What happens to my retirement product at retirement age?
There are three options available:
- If you choose to not retire at your chosen retirement age, you can leave your money in your Alexforbes Invest retirement product (and even continue to contribute to it if you wish).
- If you choose to retire, you can transfer your funds into a post-retirement investment of your choice.
- You can opt to invest in the default post-retirement product chosen by Alexforbes Invest’s Retirement Funds board of trustees. Click here to find out more about this product. Alternatively, fill in the form below and one of our friendly advisers will call you back.
This retirement benefit counselling page provides you with options available and is not a replacement for financial advice that can be obtained from our financial advisers.
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Retirement annuities and pension preservation funds
You are 55 years old and can now by law retire from your retirement annuity or pension.
Provident preservation funds
At retirement, after 1 September 2024, the following applies to the various components in a Provident Preservation Fund: