Why give that money to the taxman?
Travel-mad retiree Joggie Mentz has two pieces of advice for others to help set themselves up for retirement: don’t defer living your best life until retirement, and do your research about where to put your funds.
Joggie says a lot of people say: “One day, when I retire I will do this or I will do that”, and recounts a piece of advice he was once given by a retirement expert: “If you never had hobbies don’t think you will have hobbies when you retire. If you never travel don’t think you are going to travel when you retire.”
He and his wife of 41 years, Lodie, were obviously living their best life before retirement, as they have been since, with a lot of time spent travelling the world.
As an executive for a large multinational, Joggie travelled a lot for business and Lodie joined him frequently. Whenever they could they would add some leisure travel on before or after a business trip.
They are clearly crazy about visiting exotic places and mention New Zealand and Bali as fairly recent trips (before Covid, of course) and Japan as a place they have visited many times.
Although Joggie’s retirement means there is “lots of travel (excluding the last year, of course)”, according to Lodie, life as a retired couple is not really that different. Joggie goes as far as describing it as “business as usual”. It is clear that these two live a busy and full life, much as they have always done.
Retirement can be a tricky transition but these two, parents of two adult sons, make it look easy.
Joggie was on the board of trustees of his employer’s pension fund for years, the last six of them as chairman, so he had a lot to do with retirement planning while he was working. “They also called in experts every so often to give us advice.”
“In the end,” says Joggie, the many advisers he spoke to “basically gave me the same story”, and he ended up doing his own research and finding his way to 10X Investments.
Joggie says he was a little surprised at the fees the advisers were charging because “the bottom line is that for the rest of your life you are going to pay that fee”.
That said, he would still advise others to get advice from various people. “That is for free, you don’t pay for that but, in the end, you make up your mind yourself about what you want to do, what is best for you.”
In his case, that meant finding 10X Investments online, doing some research into the company’s performance history, and then “deciding to skip the financial adviser”.
Joggie, who is 68, had the advantage of his years as a trustee but also, he says, “My stuff was relatively simple.”
After doing some research, he says, he came to the conclusion that using a financial adviser is a “waste of money” because “it is relatively simple … it is not complex”.
Joggie hasn’t looked back. “Every time I requested something the service was excellent. The [10X] website is also very user-friendly so it is very easy to track everything that you want to track.”
And, importantly, he has been happy with how his Living Annuity has performed. “Speaking to some of the people who retired at more or less the same time as I did, their growth was less I think mainly due to the costs, 10X is well-known for probably the lowest cost in the business,” he says.
