The advice you never got is costing you every month.
Here is what fixing it looks like.

Client A did what most diligent people do at 27: chose the most comprehensive medical plan on the menu, set up the debit order, and never looked at it again. Seven years, a marriage and a baby later, the premium had escalated every January while the family’s actual claims pattern told a completely different story, they were paying for day-to-day benefits they barely used, while carrying real in-hospital shortfall risk with no gap cover at all.

Our benefit-usage audit matched three years of claims against the plan’s benefit schedule. The result: a right-sized hospital plan with a savings component, plus gap cover to close the specialist shortfall exposure that mattered most with a young child.

Client B had done everything “right”: a retirement annuity signed in 2009, escalating contributions, never missed a debit order. Then we requested the one document the annual statements never volunteered, the Effective Annual Cost disclosure. It showed an EAC of 9,9% in year one, still 5,0% over five years, and 3,9% p.a. for the full 33-year term. The line doing the damage sat quietly at the bottom of the insurer's own table: “Other”, early-termination charges of up to 4,1%, the mechanism designed to make leaving feel impossible.

We put the exit penalty on the table, did the arithmetic in front of him, and showed that the fee saving recovered it in roughly two and a half years, with more than 15 years of lower costs after that. A Section 14 transfer moved the full value to a modern platform where the same disclosure table reads very differently: “Other: 0,00%”, and an all-in cost that is identical whether you stay one year or thirty. We then allocated a portion of his discretionary portfolio to a five-year structured note offering 1,8× geared participation in a major equity index. His medical aid audit, done alongside, released a further R 2 100 per month.

Clients C and D had built a successful business, and accumulated the paper trail that comes with two decades of ad-hoc financial decisions: four separate contract retirement annuities across three insurers at a blended Effective Annual Cost of ± 2,9% p.a., wills signed in 2011 before the business existed, no buy-and-sell arrangement, and an estate that would have needed roughly R 2,3 million in cash it did not have on the first death.

This engagement was a full audit: retirement costs, estate structure, business succession and liquidity, sequenced so each move reinforced the next. Their consolidated RAs now run at 1,1% p.a., a structured note sleeve adds defined-outcome growth for the final accumulation years, new wills use the Section 4(q) spousal deduction properly, a funded buy-and-sell agreement protects the business, and the executor’s fee is capped by agreement at 1,5% instead of the statutory maximum.

Clients E and F arrived with what looked like a completed picture: property paid off, living annuities drawing comfortably, a joint estate of roughly R 18 million. The audit found the gaps that comfortable pictures hide. Their wills dated from 2009, before two grandchildren, one property purchase and a change in the estate duty landscape. The executor's fee was unnegotiated. On the first death, the estate faced an estate duty bill of roughly R 800 000 that proper Section 4(q) structuring would defer entirely, and a cash shortfall of ± R 1,3 million that would have forced the surviving spouse to sell an asset to settle costs.

Alongside the estate work, their medical aid, a top-tier comprehensive plan with no gap cover, was restructured for the claims profile of a retired couple, releasing R 2 900 per month net while adding the gap cover that matters most at their stage of life.