After a career of more than 40 years with a bank Lorraine Watt was disappointed with her pension income. After some digging and number-crunching she discovered that someone else was earning half her return. That put the final nail in the coffin of that 40-year relationship of saving with them, she says.
Lorraine, who started her career with the bank in 1974, describes her 40 years there as “good years, working with the most amazing folk”. So good that after retirement she stayed on for another three years on contract, delaying her retirement to the age of 66.
Forty seems to be a lucky number for Lorraine, who adds that she “has been married to the same man for 40 years … for my sins”. The couple have one son, a keen sailor who runs his own business.
Lorraine maintains the books for her son’s business and helps him with “endless health and safety requirements, which is extremely tedious and appears senseless”. She says her pet hate is filling out forms of any sort, one reason that she particularly enjoyed the simple and “seamless” experience of joining 10X.
This animal-loving retiree certainly doesn’t have time to waste. When she is not helping her son, she runs her smallholding and grows vegetables for the table, as well as taking care of one German Shepherd, a ginger cat, 13 Nguni cattle and six chickens.
It is not surprising to hear that Lorraine “seems to have less time now than I did while I was working a full day”. She says she has no idea how she managed it all when she was doing an eight-hour working day at the bank.
Looking back at that time, Lorraine says, she had tried to invest as much as she could on an Administrator’s salary. “I suppose you could say I am a natural saver,” she says.
Before retiring she had estimated what her monthly pension would be, and felt comfortable that she would not be forced to change her lifestyle.
But, like so many others like her, she was in for a shock. Once she had retired, the number was different from what she had expected. She started asking questions, trying to work out how to manage her investments differently to yield a higher return. She was told there was nothing she could do without eating into her capital. This was when she did further calculations and discovered that after tax someone else was earning half of her return.
At around this time “a flash of an advert regarding 10X” caught her eye. She chatted to her son about it and he told her that a friend of his, a Chartered Accountant at a large South African company, had moved his investments to 10X.
That motivated Lorraine to investigate further. She looked into 10X’s governance and compliance and “felt comfortable that they were well managed from a risk point of view”.
“I sent in a request for someone to contact me and Dewald did that on the same day.”
After she confirmed that she wanted to move her Living Annuity to 10X she was handed over to Abigail, “who made the transfer seamless”, Lorraine says, noting her earlier mention of a pet hate about completing forms.
She is happy someone else is no longer getting half her return and has enjoyed the seamless move, but Lorraine is too savvy to count her chickens yet (except the ones in her garden).
“Whether I have done the right thing, only time will tell. Contact me again when I am 86.”