Nompu Sizela: Investment manager 10X released its third iteration of the Retirement Reality Report. Previous reports have highlighted the fact that the vast majority of working South Africans are not putting themselves in a position where they’ll be able to retire comfortably. And this year, with the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the outlook has further worsened.

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Well, to tell us more I’m joined on the line by Chris Eddy. He’s the head of investments at 10X. Thanks very much, Chris, for joining us. So, what were some of the key findings from this year’s Retirement Reality Report?

Chris Eddy: Thank you very much, Nompu. I think the 2020 report additionally revealed – and just for context it’s the third year that this report has been running – that the retirement crisis situation for many South Africans hasn’t really evolved through time. If you look, going back all the way to 2013, about 6% of South Africans are able to retire comfortably. And, when we say “retire comfortably”, we mean maintain the standard of living that they had while working, in retirement. Some of the stats were estimated by National Treasury. And what the report this year showed is that only 6% of respondents said that they had a plan that they were confident in executing which would see them to retirement. So you can see some sort of corroboration of that statistic .I think the scary part is that 49% of respondents said, “I actually don’t have any plan at all”.

To give you context, the survey tracked the lifestyles of about 15 million economically active South Africans whom the sample looked at. When we are talking about “economically active”, we’re talking about household incomes greater than R8 000, because we were tracking a large universe of South Africans. So it’s quite scary to see that only 51% have some sort of plan. And, out of that, only 6% are really confident that it will get them to retirement.

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