If a chunk of your salary disappears into repayments before you've bought a single grocery, you already know how heavy debt feels. Store cards, a personal loan, a credit card that crept up, maybe car finance on top - it adds up to a monthly bill that never seems to shrink. The good news is that gett
You probably know roughly what you earn and roughly what you spend, but do you know what you're actually worth financially? Net worth is the single number that captures your true financial position - not how much you earn, but how much you've actually built up after debts. It's the figure that tells
Most people have a vague sense of what they want from their money - to be out of debt, to own a home, to retire comfortably - but vague wishes rarely turn into reality. The gap between wanting and achieving usually comes down to one thing: clear, specific goals with a plan behind them. Financial goa
When you finally reach retirement and it's time to turn your savings into an income, you face one of the biggest financial decisions of your life: how to draw that income. In South Africa, the choice usually comes down to two products with confusingly similar names - a living annuity and a life annu
The hardest part of retirement saving isn't starting - it's not touching the money along the way. Over a working life, people accumulate retirement savings and then repeatedly chip away at them, usually when changing jobs, until what should have grown into a substantial nest egg has been reset to al
Changing jobs is one of the most dangerous moments for your retirement savings - not because of anything dramatic, but because of a single tempting decision: taking the cash. When you leave an employer, the money in your workplace retirement fund suddenly becomes accessible, and that lump sum can lo
It's the question almost everyone avoids until it feels uncomfortably late: how much money do I actually need to retire? The honest answer is that it depends on your life - but that's not an excuse to never work it out. With a few simple principles, you can get a realistic sense of the target, where
If your employer deducts money from your salary for retirement, you're probably a member of either a pension fund or a provident fund - and there's a fair chance you've never been entirely sure which, or what the difference is. For years the two worked quite differently at retirement, but recent ref
If you don't have a pension or provident fund through your employer - or you want to save more for retirement on top of one - a retirement annuity is probably the tool you've been told to look into. It comes with a generous tax break, but it also comes with rules about when you can access the money,
