by SFT | Jan 19, 2026 | Financial Planning, St Francis
For most of our working lives, we are conditioned to save. Save consistently. Save diligently. Save just in case. And while this habit is essential, it can quietly become a trap if it’s never revisited.
Retirement is not simply a financial event. It’s a life transition. And like any meaningful transition, the quality of the outcome depends far more on planning than on the size of the balance sheet.
Too many people approach retirement forwards—accumulating wealth without ever asking what that wealth is meant to support. A better approach is to plan backwards. Start with the life you want to live and, just as importantly, the life you want to avoid. Regret is often clearer than aspiration. Knowing what you don’t want—poor health, isolation, boredom, dependence—creates far better plans than vague dreams of “enjoying retirement someday.”
Time, not money, is the most precious resource in retirement. There is a window—often early in retirement—when health, energy, and curiosity align. These are the “go-go years,” and they matter. Travel postponed, experiences delayed, and memories deferred don’t compound like money does. Once health declines, opportunities close, regardless of how large the portfolio remains.
This is where many retirees struggle: the transition from saving to spending. After decades of discipline, spending can feel reckless—even when it’s entirely sustainable. Without a proper plan, fear fills the gap, and people underspend their lives away, only to leave behind wealth they never truly used.
A solid financial plan changes this dynamic. It provides clarity. It answers the most important question: Am I going to be okay? With that confidence, spending becomes purposeful rather than emotional. Enjoyment becomes responsible, not indulgent. Wealth becomes a tool, not a scoreboard.
True wealth is not measured by what we die with, but by how we live while we’re here. The memories we create. The relationships we nurture. The freedom to choose.
This is why working with a financial planner who holds you accountable matters. Not someone focused on markets and products, but someone focused on your life—helping you align your money with your values and guiding you toward a dignified, fulfilling retirement.
Because in the end, money has only one real job: to help you live your best possible life, while you still can.
Dirk Groeneveld, Certified Financial Planner
t. 083 261 9287
e. dirk@clientcare.co.za
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by SFT | Jan 11, 2026 | Financial Planning, St Francis
If you’ve been paying attention to financial media lately, you’ll have seen increasingly anxious commentary about market concentration. The warning is familiar: the top 10 companies now make up a larger portion of global equity indices than ever before. Most of them are technology and AI-driven businesses, and the implication is clear—if these giants stumble, your portfolio will too.
It’s a concern worth acknowledging. But before reacting, it’s important to understand what’s really going on beneath the surface.
First, these are not “10 companies” in the way we traditionally think about them. They are vast ecosystems made up of multiple businesses, many of which could easily stand on their own as large, publicly listed companies.
Take Apple as an example. Its AirPods business alone is estimated to generate around $20 billion a year in revenue—larger than Spotify, Nintendo, eBay, or Airbnb. The same could be said for Apple’s Mac, iPad, and Wearables divisions. If Apple were broken into its component parts, the index would instantly look far more diversified, without you owning anything different.
This pattern repeats across the so-called top 10. YouTube, tucked inside Alphabet, generates over $50 billion in annual revenue. Amazon’s cloud business, AWS, now exceeds $100 billion. Microsoft houses Azure, Office, LinkedIn, and Xbox—each a major enterprise in its own right. What looks like concentration is, in part, a quirk of corporate structure.
It’s also worth remembering that market concentration is not new. There has always been a dominant group driving returns. In the 1980s it was oil and industrial companies. In the late 1990s it was telecoms and dot-coms. The names change, but leadership concentration is a constant feature of markets.
What is different today is the quality of earnings. These companies are not priced on hope alone. They generate substantial profits from products and services used by billions of people daily. That doesn’t make them invincible, but it does make today’s concentration very different from past excesses.
Importantly, the index is not static. If these companies disappoint, their weight will naturally shrink. Index investing is self-correcting by design—it quietly reduces exposure to what’s fading and increases exposure to what’s rising, without requiring predictions or heroic decisions.
The practical question is this: even if concentration leads to lower returns ahead, what’s the alternative? Guessing future winners? Moving to cash? Each carries its own risks and relies on forecasts we know are unreliable.
For long-term investors, today’s concentration is unlikely to be the deciding factor. Broad diversification across thousands of companies remains the most sensible strategy—even when a handful currently dominate the headlines.
And as always, if you’d like to talk through what this means for your own situation, we’re here.
Dirk Groeneveld, Certified Financial Planner
t. 083 261 9287
e. dirk@clientcare.co.za
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by SFT | Jan 8, 2026 | Financial Planning, St Francis
As we move into a new year, market predictions abound. They always do. Newspapers, podcasts, investment houses, and social media feeds fill up with confident forecasts about what the coming year will bring. And almost without exception, most of them will be wrong. 2026 will be no different.
A useful reminder of this came from an exercise run by Forbes in early 2025. They asked 34 billionaires how they thought the S&P 500 would perform over the year. If anyone should have insight, resources, and access to information, surely it would be them. And yet, the results were sobering.
The S&P 500 ended 2025 up 16% – an above-average return by historical standards, given that the index has delivered around 10% per year over the past seven decades. It was lower than the exceptional returns of 2023 and 2024, but still a very good year for equity investors.
The billionaires didn’t see it coming. Nearly half believed the market would be flat or down. Another 35% expected positive returns, but only in the single digits. Just 7 out of the 34 – about 21% – correctly anticipated a return in the 10% to 20% range.
If even billionaires and so-called market masters can’t reliably predict what markets will do, what chance does the normal person in the street have?
This is precisely why real wealth is not built by trying to call the next best thing or by reacting to predictions. It is built by staying in the market, through good years and bad, and by allowing time and compounding to do the heavy lifting.
This is also why your investment strategy should never exist in isolation. It should be built after – or at least alongside – a proper personal financial plan. The plan defines what you are trying to achieve. The investments are simply the tools used to get you there.
In our experience, the simpler the investment strategy, the better. Complexity rarely improves outcomes, but it almost always increases the chance of poor behaviour at the wrong time. The best investment strategy is not the most exciting or sophisticated one. It is the one you understand, believe in, and will actually stick to when markets become uncomfortable.
Predictions will keep coming. They always do. The discipline to ignore them is one of the greatest advantages an investor can have.
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Dirk Groeneveld, Certified Financial Planner
t. 083 261 9287
e. dirk@clientcare.co.za
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by SFT | Dec 23, 2025 | Financial Planning, St Francis
January has a way of prompting reflection. A new year arrives and with it the familiar questions: Should I change something? Should I do more? Should I slow down?
For many people, the honest answer is simple: I’m fine.
And on the surface, that’s a good thing. Life is stable. The bills are paid. Health is reasonable. There’s food on the table, a roof overhead, and perhaps even the freedom to live in a place many others would envy. Compared to the alternatives, “fine” feels like something to be grateful for.
But over the years, I’ve come to believe that “I’m fine” can be one of the most dangerous phrases we tell ourselves.
Not because it’s untrue — but because of what it quietly allows.
“I’m fine” often becomes a full stop instead of a comma. It closes the door on deeper questions. It postpones decisions that feel important but not urgent. It gives us permission to drift.
When life isn’t actively painful, we rarely feel the need to examine it closely. We settle into routines. We default to what’s familiar. We assume there will be time later — later to travel, later to reconnect, later to focus on health, later to live a little differently.
And later has a habit of arriving much faster than expected.
I see this often in my work with retirees and those approaching retirement. On paper, things look good. Assets are sufficient. Spending is modest. There’s no immediate financial stress. Yet beneath the surface, dreams have been quietly deferred and experiences postponed. Money, carefully accumulated over decades, remains largely untouched — not because it’s needed for security, but because there’s no clear permission to use it.
Comfort is subtle that way. It doesn’t shout. It whispers. It convinces us that maintaining the status quo is sensible and responsible. And in many areas of life, it is.
But comfort without intention can slowly turn into regret.
This isn’t a call for reckless change or dramatic reinvention. What most people need is something far simpler — deliberateness. Deliberateness about how they spend their time, how they use their money, and which relationships and experiences they prioritise while they still can.
As we move into a new year, perhaps the most useful question isn’t “Am I fine?”
It’s: “Am I living intentionally, or just comfortably?”
Because a comfortable life can be a wonderful thing — as long as it doesn’t quietly replace a meaningful one.
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Dirk Groeneveld, Certified Financial Planner
t. 083 261 9287
e. dirk@clientcare.co.za
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by SFT | Dec 14, 2025 | Financial Planning, St Francis
South Africa is facing a silent crisis. As dementia, Alzheimer’s and stroke-related cognitive decline rise sharply, many families are discovering—often in the middle of a crisis—that they are not financially equipped to support a loved one who can no longer manage their own affairs.
This would be challenging in any country. But in South Africa, the problem is amplified by a widespread misconception: that a Power of Attorney (POA) will continue working when mental capacity is lost. It doesn’t. And this misunderstanding leaves families exposed at the very moment they need support.
What a Power of Attorney Can, and Cannot, Do
A POA falls under the law of agency. It allows a principal to grant an agent authority to perform specific legal acts on their behalf. The key principle is simple but crucial:
An agent cannot do anything the principal would not be legally capable of doing themselves.
This means a POA—whether general or specific—only works while the principal still has full mental capacity. It automatically terminates upon insolvency, death, or any loss of mental capacity. Banks and institutions have become increasingly strict about this, often rejecting POAs the moment there is doubt about capacity.
So, while POAs are extremely useful for travel, temporary incapacity, emigration, or convenience, they offer no protection at all once cognitive decline sets in.
The Legal Gap: No Enduring POA in South Africa
Many developed countries have “enduring” or “lasting” powers of attorney that continue to operate after incapacity. South Africa drafted similar legislation years ago, but it was never enacted. Until that changes, the only options when capacity is lost are:
Curatorship – a High Court application, slow, costly, and emotionally draining.
Administration – a limited option for smaller estates, via the Master of the High Court.
Both can take months, even years. Meanwhile, access to bank accounts and assets is effectively frozen—even when funds are urgently needed for care.
Your Practical Options Today
While our legal framework is outdated, families still have ways to prepare:
Use joint accounts or dual signatories for essential transactions.
Consider co-ownership of key assets.
Explore an inter vivos trust, which continues operating even if a trustee becomes incapacitated.
Act early—long before cognitive decline is suspected.
Work with a financial planner who can guide the family through the complexities.
Cognitive decline often arrives suddenly. The financial consequences do, too. A thoughtful plan, built while capacity is still intact, is one of the greatest gifts you can give your family.
If this topic touches your situation, let’s talk. Early preparation brings clarity, dignity, and peace of mind when it’s needed most.
Dirk Groeneveld, Certified Financial Planner
t. 083 261 9287
e. dirk@clientcare.co.za
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by SFT | Dec 1, 2025 | Financial Planning, St Francis
I have written a lot about the challenges we face moving from a working career to retirement. About how difficult it can be creating a new persona that is not linked to our career or the title we had while working which often defined who we were. Most people eventually make that transition but there is another challenge which is easy to miss, and I see this with many clients I work with.
The move from saving and building wealth to spending that wealth in a way that brings them true happiness.
I see many people who have what they want, huge wealth, but not what they need, real happiness. For many being a saver has become part of their identity and making the change to spending that wealth is a massive challenge. What makes this challenge more complicated is that even when some people do spend money it does not necessarily make them any happier,
In his book The Art of Spending Money, Morgan Housel says: There are two ways of spending money. One is as a tool to live a better life. The other is as a yardstick of status to measure yourself against others. Many people aspire for the former but spend their life chasing the latter.
We are all different and what makes one person happy does not necessarily make another person happy. Often, we do what we think people expect of someone with our level of wealth should do and are still left feeling disappointed and unhappy.
A simple lifestyle does not mean that we cannot live with nice things in a beautiful home and enjoy wonderful holidays. These things can make life easier and more comfortable, but what is important is that we choose this life based on our own values and needs and not because everyone else who looks like me is doing it.
Most people spend their life making a living, don’t be someone who forgets to build a life.
Dirk Groeneveld, Certified Financial Planner
t. 083 261 9287
e. dirk@clientcare.co.za
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