GTC-Q1-2026

Retirement has a strange habit of turning otherwise sensible people into short-term thinkers. You can spend 30 or 40 years saving steadily, investing patiently, and ignoring the noise.  Then the payslip stops, and the questions begin:  What if markets fall now?  What if I have to sell at the bottom?  These are rational questions.  Retirement changes one crucial rule:  you stop accumulating assets and start drawing from them.  The order in which returns arrive suddenly matters far more. That’s what people mean by sequence of returns risk – the danger that weak markets early in retirement permanently damage a portfolio while income is still being withdrawn.  It’s the financial equivalent of starting a long hike by spraining your ankle in the first kilometer. Most retirement plans are built for spreadsheet assumptions:  tidy average returns and manageable inflation.  Real life rarely... Read More

There’s a moment that arrives for many South Africans in their late 50’s or 60’s when the conversation shifts.  You stop talking about what you are busy buying and start talking about what you are going to use.  The vocabulary changes:  ‘growth’ becomes ‘income’, ‘long term’ becomes ‘this month’, and suddenly you find yourself staring at a question that feels oddly basic for something you’ve spent decades building: Where do I take the money from first? It’s a deceptively simple – though very important – question, and the culmination of the first half of one’s retirement plan – the savings phase.  Any portfolio of long-term savings has multiple ‘pots’ of money, and the order in which you tap into them can meaningfully affect tax, flexibility, investment performance, risk profiling, and how long your capital lasts. Before triggering the first income... Read More

Retirement has a marketing problem.  It’s sold as a long holiday: fewer emails, more golf, maybe a Wednesday that looks suspiciously like a Saturday.  The reality is that retirement is not a destination.  It’s a new operating system – with different income rules, different risks, and (crucially) a different you. The biggest retirement mistakes are rarely about ‘not knowing’ – they’re about ‘not doing’. What does it mean to ‘practice’ retirement? Think of it like a fire drill.  Nobody runs a fire drill because they hope for a fire.  You do it because the panic is predictable, and practice makes the panic smaller.  A retirement rehearsal is simply a structured trial run where you test: whether your budget works when the salary stops. whether your portfolio can survive withdrawals and market drama. whether your time has shape and meaning whether... Read More

There is a comforting story we tell ourselves about financial wellbeing.  It goes something like this:  if I earned a bit more, things would settle.  If the bonus was bigger, if the interest rate was lower, if my salary finally ‘caught up’ with my life, then I’d feel in control. It’s not a stupid story.  South Africans are under real pressure, and plenty of households have no real slack left after the debit orders have had their feast.  The problem is that the feeling of control often refuses to arrive, even when the numbers improve.  People earn more and still live on the edge.  They become ‘higher income’ and stay financially anxious.  They can explain what they should do and still don’t do it. The recently released Franc Wealth Index Survey involved 4 000 South Africans and reviewed how habits,... Read More

Bonuses are often misunderstood by both employees and employers.  Recent case law prompts a topical discussion as to the entitlement – or not – that staff really have to this benefit. As South Africans settle back into a normal working rhythm after the numerous April and May public holidays – not entirely unlike Britain’s Bank Holidays or America’s summer slowdown – a familiar workplace question begins surfacing again:  ‘Are we getting a year-end bonus?’ For many employees, an annual December payment feels woven into the rhythm of working life.  In some companies, bonuses arrive with such consistency that employees mentally treat them as part of their annual income. In others, they appear irregularly and unexpectedly.  Yet despite how common bonuses are, many people do not fully understand how they function legally, or financially. According to Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr (CDH), South... Read More

Inflation has become surprisingly polite.  Stats SA’s latest data places headline CPI at 3.1% year-on-year to March 2026, comfortably within the South African Reserve Bank’s target range and well below the levels households endured only a few years ago.  Food inflation has moderated, several staple categories have shown limited price pressure, and transport inflation remained in deflationary territory through March. At face value, the environment appears relatively stable.  Yet South African households have entered the second quarter of 2026 facing a very different lived reality, particularly after the extraordinary fuel price adjustments introduced in April and again in May.  From 1 April 2026, inland petrol prices increased sharply, while diesel recorded one of the steepest monthly increases in recent history.  By May, inland 95 unleaded petrol had moved above R26 per litre, with diesel climbing above R32 per litre in... Read More

Gary Mockler Group Chief Executive Officer   ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ After 40 years in the industry, the single biggest failing of investors that I have observed – and it hasn’t changed over this time – isn’t about the understanding of savings.  It isn’t about compound returns or market timing (though of course these are also misunderstood).  In my opinion, the consistent single largest failing is that so many investors don’t apply the savings principles which they know will work.   Of course, retirement saving is in good company.  How many guitars hang on walls after three lessons?  How many garages contain dust covered brand new bicycles, and consider all those expensive treadmills which now function as clothes racks?  Surely since the early days of mankind (with the adage ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’  being coined by 11th century... Read More

Market commentary  The economic fallout from the third Gulf war – involving the United States, Israel, and Iran – has severely restricted supply from one of the world’s most significant oil producing regions.  This has created a fear fueled environment which has caused investors around the globe to divest from ‘risk-on’ assets like equities (shares), emerging market assets, and emerging market currencies in favour of ‘safe haven’ assets such as the dollar and US government bonds over the month of March.  The view of the quarter is considerably less discouraging and reminds us that short term periods of uncertainty are far less impactful over the longer term. Local Growth Assets: During March, the broad-based local equity market (-10.6%) reversed gains earned in January and February to end the quarter down -0.5% amid the ongoing Gulf war.  Despite a -16.5% return in... Read More