More than half of retirees in South Africa receive a pension of less than R4 000 a month, the recently released BankservAfrica Private Pension Index reveals.
How will your retirement look if you retire with what the index reveals is the typical pension of R3 559 a month?
The index covers 85 percent of all pension payments that are made from one bank to another and therefore pass through BankservAfrica’s payment clearing system.
BankservAfrica also monitors the salaries that bank customers are paid through the payment clearing system. The pension index reveals that, on average, pensions equivalent to only 45 percent of the disposable salaries (salaries after tax and other deductions) earned by employees in the formal sector.
The index also reveals that, although the average pensioner’s income grew eight percent in 2014, the average increase masks the much lower increases – even decreases after inflation – in the pensions received by lower-income earners.
Pension increases were just two percent – that is, less than half the average inflation rate of 5.3 percent for the year to December – for pensioners who were in the middle of the range of some 620 000 pension payments made through BankservAfrica.
There is little that pensioners already in retirement can do if their pensions are small and increasing at a rate lower than inflation. But if your retirement is still ahead of you, you can make decisions now that will have a huge impact on what your retirement will look like.
To empower you to make the right decisions for the best outcome in retirement, Personal Finance has teamed up with Alexander Forbes to bring you the Ready Set Retire conference with the theme “Live your best retirement”. Find out what retirement entails and how to tackle your retirement planning to enjoy this phase of your life, with a good balance between your financial and physical well-being.
The one-day Ready Set Retire conference will be held on March 5 in Port Elizabeth, March 9 in Cape Town, March 11 in Johannesburg, and March 17 in Durban. The programme includes the following presentations:
* Tax planning for retirement – Jenny Gordon, head of legal advice for Alexander Forbes’s retail division;
* Investing for your goals – Gareth Johnson, head of individual investments at Investment Solutions;
* Understanding the realities of your retirement decisions – John Anderson, Alexander Forbes pensions industry expert;
* Getting your health cover sorted – Anthea Towert, Alexander Forbes health-funding expert;
* The retirement decision – Bruce Cameron, founding editor of Personal Finance, and a financial adviser from each region;
* Eating smart in retirement – Benny Masekwameng, celebrity chef and MasterChef South Africa judge; and
* Building a bridge between employment and retirement – Cathy Yuill, adult development coach.
Booking for the conference, through Computicket, is open. Tickets cost R250, but if you book by February 10, you pay the “early bird” price of just R200.
The one-day conference will be followed later in the year by Ready Set Retire club sessions dealing with topics in more depth. For more details, visit www.readysetretire.co.za