Understanding company-provided death and disability cover ins and outs Insuring your ability to earn an income, and ensuring your loved ones are taken care of if something happens to you, is top priority for many of us. At a bare minimum, this usually entails life insurance and ‘insurance’ benefits such as disability or critical illness cover. Depending on your company package a lot of this may be covered through your employee benefits arrangement. But there are some key diff

Statistics SA has recently revealed its latest data on divorce and marriages in SA, recording an increase in divorce orders between 2013 and 2017. In 2017 there were 25,390 completed divorce forms processed – indicating an increase of 0.3% from the 25,326 processed in 2016. The findings also show that four in ten divorces (44.6%) of those processed in 2017 came from marriages that did not reach their tenth wedding anniversary. Mlulami Nxele, legal advisor at Allan Gray, says

The rise in popularity of index tracking strategies has delivered strong revenue growth for index providers over recent years. Effectively, index providers design indices for index managers to track, and charge a nominal licence fee for this service. The big three index providers, MSCI, S&P Dow Jones and FTSE Russell, have been exceptionally successful in increasing their dominance in the market with a combined market share of almost 80% currently, as strong brand recognition

Investing in market underdogs is a winning investment strategy One of the first principles in investing is to “buy low and sell high”. A second principle is to avoid the risk of doing the exact opposite, namely “buying high and selling low”. While these two principles seem patently obvious, they can be challenging to implement, even for the most experienced investor. This is because of a fundamental vulnerability in the human psyche: the herd instinct. But, for disciplined an

We all know to check our blind spots while driving to help prevent accidents which are not in our direct line of sight. Blind spots also exist when it comes to our financial well-being. Like when you’re behind the wheel of a car, not identifying a potential financial blind spot can have an expensive and lasting effect on our finances. Gerard Visser, Financial Planning Consultant at Alexander Forbes Financial Planning Consultants, outlines some of the mistakes people make: 1.

In April 2018 Fairheads Benefit Services took over two unclaimed benefit funds from the Sygnia group and launched the Fairheads Unclaimed Benefit Preservation Pension Fund and the Fairheads Unclaimed Benefit Preservation Provident Fund. It was logical for us to take over the administration of these funds as we have a proven track record in tracing those who are unaware of the benefits that are due to them. Our intention is to use these capabilities to help alleviate the huge

Introduction During 2017 the Minister of Finance issued the final retirement fund default regulations (commonly referred to as “Default Regulations”) made in terms of section 36 of the Pension Funds Act, 1956. These Default Regulations, published in Notice 863 of Government Gazette No. 41064, were the outcome of an extensive consultative process between Treasury and the FSCA (the first draft was published back in July 2015) and intend to improve the outcomes for members of re

One of the disruptive technologies and one with perhaps the widest impact on a variety of businesses is undoubtedly Blockchain. Often confused and mistakenly linked solely to Bitcoin (Blockchain was developed as the transaction platform for Bitcoin), it’s in actual fact much, much more. Blockchain, in its simplest of terms, is a time-stamped series of immutable and incorruptible record of data managed by cluster of computers but not owned by any single entity. Here’s how it w