This series of columns has dealt with what to do with a lump sum that you might have received through inheritance or being retrenched.
But for most of us there is a far more common way of receiving a lump sum ? your pension or provident fund contributions when you leave an employer.
Assuming you are several years away from retirement, there are at least five options from which to choose.
* The first is to take the lump sum as cash to satisfy your immediate needs.
Beverley Cawley, group benefits division director at the Pride Group, strongly urges that even if you are only in your early 20s you should not succumb to the temptation to spend your retirement lump sum.
"I've seen too many people complaining that they have worked for 20 or 30 years and when they retire they have not even saved enough money to pay their monthly grocery bill," she says.
If you do intend to squander the money, the tax implications are quite severe.
The first R1 800 is tax-free and anything above that is taxed at your average rate. This is the average percentage paid to the Receiver of Revenue on everything you earned normally during the year.
* The second option is to transfer the current value of your retirement fund, both your own and (if the fund allows it) your employer's contributions, to your new employer's fund.
That assumes your new employer has one and it is compatible with your old one.
Cawley explains that if you transfer from a provident fund to a provident fund, or from a pension fund to a pension fund, no tax is paid on transfer.
But if you transfer from a pension fund to a provident fund, you pay tax at your average rate on the value of your past contributions to the fund (but no tax on the employer's contributions).
There would be little point in transferring from a provident fund to a pension fund since you would be moving from a system where you are paid a full lump sum on retirement to one where only one-third of your savings is made available to you on retirement.
The rest has to be used to purchase a monthly income.
* The third option is to buy a single-premium retirement annuity.
That has the disadvantage that your savings cannot be touched until you reach the retirement age you nominated, which has to be at least 55.
When you retire, an RA is treated like a pension ? one-third lump sum, the rest into a compulsory monthly annuity.
But the fact of having paid a single premium into an RA can reduce the tax-free portion of the one-third lump sum.
The tax-free portion on the lump sum is the greater of R120 000 or R4 500 multiplied by the number of years you contributed to the RA.
A single-premium RA is regarded as one year of contributions so it places you at a disadvantage.
* The fourth option, available only in the last three or four years, is to put the lump sum into a pension or provident preservation fund.
You pay no tax immediately if you do this, and on retirement the tax structure is the same as that applicable to any other pension or provident fund.
The number of years you contributed is accrued for the purpose of the tax calculation.
A preservation fund allows you to make one partial or full withdrawal before you reach retirement age. That withdrawal is also taxable at your average rate.
The same tax implications of switching between a pension or provident fund apply to moving to a pension or provident preservation fund.
Cawley says most institutions ? both life assurers and investment houses ? offer a preservation fund.
These can be invested in a range of instruments, from funds that are balanced between different types of investments to those invested entirely in equity or interest-bearing instruments, and you can choose different kinds of guarantees.
You cannot continue to contribute towards a preservation fund and there is no limit on the number of different preservation funds you can hold.
* The fifth and final option is allowed by some, but not all, retirement funds. You can leave your money in there as a "paid-up benefit" until you retire.
Some funds allow you to retain not only your own contributions but also those made by your employer.
Others allow you to benefit only from your own contributions, plus interest.