Financial Retirement Planning- Part 4

financial Retirement Planning

Retirement planning for most means financial retirement planning.

In this fourth and final part of our retirement blog post series, we look at the financial aspects of retirement. If you missed the previous three parts visit our blog index. We covered General Retirement Topics, Retirement Accommodation and Retirement Activities. 

What is Financial Retirement Planning?

In short financial retirement planning is setting and arranging your financial affairs to incorporate the future when you reach a point where you retire or no longer work. The first and foremost objective is to secure a source of income.

It should be quite obvious that this is a well-discussed topic online and many companies exist that offer specialized services with regard to financial retirement planning.

Another often ignored and crucially important facet of retirement financial planning is to start as early as possible, this is not something you start when you retire.

Note: this blog post is not giving advice or any financial service, the purpose is simply to give you a general overview of financial planning and hopefully set you in a direction to start planning.

How does Retirement Financial Services Work?

As mentioned above, many companies offer a plethora of financial services focused on retirement. The basic concept of these services is to enable you to make monthly payments, which these companies then invest, and according to your type of plan, make payouts to aid you during retirement.

For obvious reasons, trust is the first and foremost consideration, investing your money for years only to find out that your entire retirement fund vanished, really happens.

If you are employed by an established company, a retirement package is often part of your remuneration. But even then in some cases, this can end up in a bad way. So it is always a good idea to have redundancy and not have all your eggs in one basket.

Scams and frauds are a part of reality and do not only happen in movies. Everyone is out to make extra income, and this leads to many cases per year where older and retired people get scammed out of their life savings. Never think because of your age, people will not take advantage of you.

Retired people make the best targets for scam artists. Recently retired people often get a lump sum of money, or in some cases are simply not able to make sober decisions due to illness and diseases that affect thinking and mental wellness, like dementia etc.

However sad, it is true and not the only caveat of retirement. Inflation is a big determining factor in the outcome of your investments and not necessarily a popular option but the default in most cases is the reliance on Government Pension.

The Older Person’s Grant

In South Africa, the Older Person’s Grant is now what used to be the Pension fund. This grant is paid out to persons older than 60 years of age and comes with conditions. Get the details here on the Government’s Pension Website.

If you qualify to receive the Older Persons Grant, get it, after all, why not? But never make it your retirement financial plan that you will be relying on to stay alive. It is a well-known fact that not only in South Africa but in general Government pension grants are far below the breadline and never make the bottom limit to eke out a living even when you are healthy.

Financial Retirement Planning

Financial Retirement Planning Options

Taking all the cautionary advice into consideration, what do you do? The long and the short of it is you have to work on your retirement plan on a monthly basis and start as early in your life as possible. 

There are many ways to ensure a retirement income. Apart from financial plans offered by service providers, some people spend a lifetime growing assets and then liquidating them as required with property investment being a popular and stable option.

Property Investment

The advantage of property investments is the fact that you can earn monthly rental income with very little effort. You can maintain this into old age and still keep your properties or liquidate them as it suits your needs.

Property Investment is a big topic by itself, here is a link to Investect a trusted and proven financial services company.

Here are some links regarding Property Investments:

Financial Retirement Planning Service Providers

Here are some useful links to various Financial Service Providers in South Africa:

Conclusion

That is it, the final post of our Retirement blog series, in this series, we started with an overview on Planning for Retirement,  Retirement Accommodation, Staying Active in Retirement and finally, this post that serves as a broad overview of Retirement Financial Planning. Stay in touch by following us on our La Gratitude Facebook Page, we post once a week and will be covering some interesting topics related to retirement in the following weeks.

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