Donny Gordon, chairman of Liberty Life, is developing the rather nasty habit of shocking people in his chairman's statement.
Last year he sounded a siren warning about the overvalued state of international markets. This year he does it again and gives notice of the "retirement time-bomb" quietly ticking away.
He writes: "One of the intractable problems facing the world in the forthcoming years will be the retirement time-bomb, which, if not energetically confronted, will result in widespread poverty in retirement and will reverse the perceived culture in mature western countries of apparent easy and continuous wealth creation in the declining years of a rapidly aging population. It is impossible to grasp all the implications of this massive, virtually insoluble crisis."
Crisis, what crisis? many people will think. Is this just another assurance salesman wanting to sell us more of his products?
Well, sad to say, this is not the case. Having spent the last couple of weeks preparing for a series of investment seminars, called the Truth About Retirement, which, incidentally, is also the title of a new book I'm co-writing with Bruce Cameron, I have come to much the same conclusion.
I also suspect, judging from the enormous turnout at these seminars, that many other South Africans are also starting to question their own complacency concerning retirement.
In fact, such is the crisis, that most South Africans will have to forget about the traditional notion of retirement.
What surprised me doing research for these seminars is that the current notion of retirement is a very recent one. The fact that our parents have basically been able to take the last chapter of their lives off, and be paid, is a freak occurrence, a confluence of benefits that we're not likely to see again. As a recent edition of Fortune magazine puts it: "It was actually a mixture of corporate expediency and economic good luck that led to our modern concept of retirement."
Change every mindset you may or may not have about retirement - about how much you should be saving, about how your employer/the state/your pension fund is going look after you.
Also reconsider how many years you're likely to be retired and how much capital you're going to need to fund that retirement.
Without actually realising it, we have already seen the manifestations of this paradigm shift in our own country.
For one, you are likely to be retired for much longer than you ever thought possible. Life expectancy is increasing all the time. The average life expectancy today is very close to 80 for women and about 76 for men.
Anyone aged 40 today has, on average, a 75 percentage chance of reaching the age of 65. This is mainly the result of improved medical treatment and generally healthier lifestyles. To put this into perspective, think about this: if you are 40 and intend retiring at 60, you only have 240 pay days left.
To try and live from 240 pay days, pay your taxes, school fees (and the insurance on your new BMW) AND fund roughly the same period in retirement is virtually impossible.
In fact, if you're not going to inherit a lot of money or win the jackpot at Sun City, retirement is not going to happen the way you thought it would.
Also, while you might have long ago given up on the notion that the state will look after you, you must also realise that your company is also not going to look after you.
In fact, so desperate are companies to get you off their traditional defined benefit fund, that they are offering massive incentives for you to move across to the defined contribution fund. The very small print in this whole process is that once this happens, YOU take over the eventual liability of what happens to your retirement funds. This is often overlooked by people clamouring to get their hands on that very large amount of money that will eventually come their way.
And if that's not bad enough, you have government that has identified retirement funds as a very convenient and handy source of income.
Expect more moves in future that will only mean one thing: more taxes on retirement funds.
Starting next week I'll be writing a series of articles on the pitfalls of retirement planning.
If you still hope to have a slim chance of retiring the way you've always dreamed you would, don't miss it.