Planning now for 40 years of life beyond work

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SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Renee Coughlan, product portfolio manager at FNB Wealth and Investments. Renee, appreciate the time. Your 2026 FNB Retirement Insights survey just came out.

A ton of data, and I think the absolute headline number that stands out is 73% of South Africans under 60 now have a retirement plan. This is up from 60% in 2025. That is a giant improvement.

RENEE COUGHLAN: It is very encouraging to see, Simon. So in the four years that we’ve been doing the survey, we always wanted to see a positive movement. And when we saw that 73% are now having retirement plans, it was definitely very encouraging.

I think people are just engaging more with the story about retirement, thinking about their own experiences now, but maybe what they’ve seen of their parents retiring as well. So it’s just becoming more of a topic of conversation out there.

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SIMON BROWN: That is a fair point. I look out, and I think I don’t know what’s changed. I suppose it is just an evolution. I like your point that of course our parents are retiring, maybe two grandparents, depending on how old we are, but we are seeing it starting to happen and it is just an evolution in a conversation that has been going on for as long as I can remember.

RENEE COUGHLAN: I think many people have avoided the retirement topic, thinking, this is something I’m going to do when I’m 55 – or even like my own experience of my parents was my father thought about it only literally the day before he was actually going to retire.

SIMON BROWN: Okay, that is a very, very much last minute. The question is they have a retirement plan, I suppose, but is it a good enough retirement plan? That’s kind of like how long is a is a piece of string.

I suppose a plan is better than no plan. But of course the Ts&Cs apply. How much has been saved? Is there enough disposable income being saved towards retirement?

RENEE COUGHLAN: Yes, absolutely. If you think what a retirement plan consists of, the majority of our respondents said, ‘A retirement plan is that I have a retirement fund or a retirement annuity.’

But that doesn’t give us insight into how much you’re contributing. Is it enough? What is the desired picture that you have for your retirement years, and is this one thing going to get you there or not, because it’s really about the layers of retirement planning. It’s a multi-layered exercise and it’s not a once-off.

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You have to go back every year and look at am I actually on track, have I covered all my bases, because just having the RA [retirement annuity] is not enough.

Do you have access to things like emergency savings for capital expenses – your geyser bursts, you have a big medical expense that you hadn’t even thought about.

So your plan has to be robust enough and [have] layers upon layers, to make sure that you are not going to fall into that gap of not being correctly in line for retirement.

SIMON BROWN: That’s actually a great point. Retirement, yes, it’s a date at some point in the future. But even that has become flexible.

The idea that you worked and then suddenly you stop, as in the example of your father – there’s a lot more to it and there’s a lot more planning around it – such as tax efficiencies, maybe estate planning as well, maybe side hustles. It’s a lot more than just, ‘Well, I’ve got an RA.’

RENEE COUGHLAN:  Yes, absolutely. And that’s something I saw that was becoming another topic of conversation this year. It is that we sort of have engaged side hustles over time. People have been filling maybe a small gap with a side hustle.

But what we’re seeing now is that for the under- and over-60s side hustles are becoming the new normal. It could be, ‘I need to generate extra income,’ or ‘I need extra income streams because I need more for my retirement plan than I thought.’

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But even for retirees going into retirement, the day I’m no longer driving to my office is now: ‘What am I doing? I need something to engage my mind. I need to make sure that I remain purposeful. I also would like to have those extra income streams so I can go and do all the other things that I would like to do.’

SIMON BROWN: That’s a great point. Make no mistake, money is important and it’s a huge part of retirement. But another huge part of retirement is ‘now what?’  It is not that you retire at 65 with a life expectancy of 70. You retire at 65 and you’ve a potential life expectancy of 90-plus.

RENEE COUGHLAN: Yes. That’s an important factor in your planning. A lot of people think, well, I’m going to retire and I’m only going to need money for 20 years.

But when we look at mortality rates, people are living different lifestyles from what my grandparents did. They’re much healthier, they’re lasting longer in retirement.

So you can’t just plan for 20 years. You have to look at a sort of 40-year retirement term and make sure that you have enough money to fund that.

If you think about how many years you spend working versus how many years you could potentially spend in retirement, it could be the same number of years. So we really have to make sure that we keep those calculations going.

As I said, go and check in at least every year, two years – am I actually on track or not?

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SIMON BROWN: That’s a great point, and I hadn’t thought of it that way. We might be retired as long as we were working.

But there’s also uncertainty. I suspect the hard, stark reality is that we don’t quite know what those retirement expenses are going to be, particularly healthcare. But perhaps just good old fashioned inflation, perhaps family responsibility. There are a lot of unknowns in retirement.

RENEE COUGHLAN: There are, and it’s very difficult, as you say, to plan for the unknowns.

But a paradigm for me was looking at what people are spending right now if they’re under 60. There was always this misconception that, oh, when I’m retired I’m only going to need 50% of my income.

But if you look at how people are allocating their incomes right now, the under 60s and the over 60s are pretty much a mirror image. So we mustn’t think that we are going to have all this extra money because we are no longer working.

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Those expenses have replacements of new expenses, things like looking at the cost of retirement villages, and what your medical aid contribution is going to be in your elderly years.

What are those hospital expenses going to be? I’m no longer driving to work or buying nice corporate suits; those expenses are just replaced with other things.

SIMON BROWN: That’s a fair point. There are different expenses. Still expenses there, but lurking differently.

We’ll leave it there. Renee Coughlan, product portfolio manager at FNB Wealth and Investments, has been discussing  the 2026 FNB Retirement Insights Survey. I appreciate the time.

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