These Are the Crucial Advice Points on the Road to Retirement
There are certain points during your working career at which appropriate advice on managing your retirement savings is crucial. Getting the right advice at the right time during your wealth-building journey can make the difference between a comfortable and a miserable retirement.
This was highlighted recently in the 2026 Sanlam Benchmark Survey, an annual survey of retirement funds tracking, among other things, trends in members’ savings behaviour and efforts by funds to improve retirement outcomes. It found there was a disconnect between people’s attitudes towards retirement savings and their actions: while respondents believed their mid-30s was the right time to begin planning for retirement, the average retirement fund member only started engaging with their fund between three and four years before retirement and professional advice was sought, on average, less than two years before retirement.
In 2017, new regulations for retirement funds required that funds provide members with retirement benefits counselling. This was not intended to be full-on financial advice; rather, it was to explain to members their investment and withdrawal options on starting a job and on exiting a fund though resignation, retrenchment or retirement.
Retirement benefits counselling as provided by retirement funds can vary from sending members a written pamphlet to arranging a conversation with a human counsellor. In other words, some funds take it more seriously than others.
In the Insights Report accompanying the Sanlam Benchmark Survey, Nomawetu Msutwana, branch head of benefit consulting and principal benefit consultant at Simeka Consultants and Actuaries, believes members should receive a combination of institutional and retail advice at crucial points in their retirement journey – put simply, benefits counselling provided by the fund should be supplemented by personal advice from a qualified financial adviser or planner.
Msutwana identifies the points at which counselling and advice are needed as follows:
• Onboarding: The fund should explain your membership, contribution options, default options and risk benefits. An adviser can look at your personal budget, debt plan, emergency savings, and contribution strategy.
• Mid-career: The fund should provide annual benefit statements, track your net replacement ratio (your eventual pension as a percentage of final salary), and educate you about preservation. An adviser can help with retirement planning, your dependants’ needs, insurance, home loan, education costs, and tax.
• Changing jobs or retrenchment: The fund should provide access to preservation options, while warning about the tax implications of a withdrawal. An adviser can help you to compare cash-out versus preservation scenarios and address immediate household pressures.
• Savings pot withdrawal decision: The fund’s role is to explain the rules, access process, tax and impact on your retirement. An adviser can assess whether a withdrawal is necessary and provide alternatives to protect your long-term savings.
• 10+ years before retirement: At this stage the fund needs to flag off-track members and provide targeted education. An adviser can help get you back on track if necessary by devising a recovery plan, reassessing your retirement fund contributions, reducing your debt and ensuring your investments are aligned with your retirement age.
• Final five years: The fund needs to explain the retirement process and tell you about what in-fund and trustee-endorsed strategies are available to you on retirement. An adviser’s role at this stage is to personalise your income needs, looking at tax obligations, medical aid, estate planning issues, and annuity selection.
Msutwana says the survey reveals a clear message: members want advice that comes earlier and is simpler, more practical and more personal. “Institutional advice gives the retirement system scale and consistency. Retail advice gives members the personal relevance required to act. When the two operate separately, members experience advice as a series of disconnected interventions. When they are integrated, advice becomes a continuous journey that supports better decisions at the moments that matter,” she says.
