Barry Kaganson, CEO of Auria Senior Living

Let’s start with the demographic facts. Statistics South Africa’s latest healthy ageing report shows the number of people aged 60 or older grew from 3,6 million in 2002 to 6,6 million in 2025, rising from 7,7% of the population to 10,5%. People are reaching their later years in better health than any generation before them. That is a triumph.

Yet the financial services industry is still selling SA products designed for a lifespan that no longer exists. Almost every retirement plan in this country is built around a single date, usually 65, with an unspoken assumption that the money needs to last twelve to fifteen years beyond it. I see the consequences of that assumption every day, and I will say plainly what the industry tends to soften: it is wrong, it is getting more wrong every year, and it is going to leave a generation of South Africans old and broke.

Now put the savings picture next to it. Only 6% of South Africans are on track to stop working without compromising their standard of living, according to the 10X Retirement Reality Report, and roughly two-thirds of adults are either not saving for their later years at all or are working off a vague plan at best. The household savings rate is negative, at minus 1,30% in the first quarter of 2026, which means the average household is going backwards. Sanlam Corporate’s Age of Confidence research found South Africans may need to work a full two decades past the typical retirement age just to maintain their lifestyle.

“Research tells us that the average South African can afford to stop working is closer to 80 than 65. Yet the industry keeps printing brochures with silver-haired couples on golf courses at 60.”

Sixty is clearly the new 50. My view is that we should stop planning for a retirement date altogether and start planning for the decades we live beyond it. Someone retiring at 65 today should be stress-testing their money against a thirty-year horizon, and increasingly against a thirty-five-year one. A plan built for fifteen years and stretched across thirty fails at the worst possible moment, when earning capacity is gone and options have collapsed. Research from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College shows that 80% of 65-year-olds will need long-term care at some point over their remaining lives, and about 40% will require high-intensity care for more than a year. Care is precisely the cost that fifteen-year plans ignore. Anyone designing for people who may live to 100, as our sector now must, learns quickly that dementia and long-term care stop being edge cases and become central planning assumptions. Households need to make the same mental shift, because a plan that budgets for holidays and hobbies but skips frail care has misread where the real costs of a long life sit.

Global capital worked this out long before local planning conventions did. Welltower, a single American real estate investment trust, reported some 33 billion dollars of transaction activity in the past year as it repositioned itself entirely around housing for older adults. That is one company, in one year, betting heavily on the simple fact that people are living longer. South Africa, by contrast, has almost no publicly available research on its senior living market. In my view, Life Right continuing care communities represent the most compelling investment case in this country. The model is simple: a resident pays once for the lifelong legal right to live in a home, and the operator keeps ownership, which means the operator carries the risk and the upkeep for as long as the resident lives there. That structure solves the problem the savings industry has failed to solve, aligning the interests of resident and operator over decades and giving residents financial predictability across a horizon no unit trust brochure dares to model.

People often ask me when someone should start planning financially for their later years. My answer is unfashionable in its simplicity: as soon as possible, and far earlier than the industry’s engagement patterns suggest anyone does. Waiting until the shortfall is undeniable converts a planning exercise into a crisis, and crises at 75 offer very few exits.

My advice is to take a current plan and test it against a thirty-year horizon instead of a fifteen-year one. If it holds, you sit in a fortunate minority of roughly 6% of the country. If it does not, then you must buy yourself the one asset longevity planning values above all others, which is time to do something about it.

ENDS