The year is gradually drawing to a close, and I am sure the Christmas shopping and holiday preparations are well underway for many of you. Unfortunately, with the 4th wave upon us, many of you have had to change your plans and possibly won’t be seeing your loved ones due to international travel bans. Our thoughts and best wishes are with all of you. Thank you for your continued support this year. It has once again been a trying one as we continue to navigate through uncertain times.

We are taking all the necessary Covid precautions to keep our clients and staff safe. I am grateful to our team for playing their part in this and are currently 92% vaccinated. It is encouraging to note that as we plan for the year ahead, the focus of our conversations has been on opening up and moving forward rather than shutting off and preserving.

Our planning teams have spent much time reflecting on the year and taking our learnings into 2022. Although Chartered has specialised in retirement planning over the past eight years, and mainly due to positive engagements and feedback from our clients, we have included a few other services to enhance our advice offering. These have included Kerryn and her team at Chartered Legacy & Trust. We have seen a huge benefit to bringing your RetiremeantTM Specialist and our Legal Advisors in Legacy into your estate planning conversations and ensuring that the drafting of your Will and ultimately the execution of your Will are seamless. Subsequently, we included Charmaine and Chartered Tax into the business five years ago as we found that tax planning and submission had become quite onerous and complex. Taking this stress and uncertainty away from our clients has had many benefits. More than 400 clients are now enjoying this service, and in many cases, we can take care of all tax submissions without having to hound our clients for documents as we have access to most of these within the business. More recently, there has been merit in using Chartered Tax to do the estate late tax returns; this is still fairly new to SARS, and Charmaine has been complimented on her understanding of this specialist area of work.

We recently included Personal Share portfolio management into the Chartered Invest Service. It has been encouraging to see how many clients have appointed us to assist them in this area. The Local and Global investment universe has also become highly complex and not so easy to navigate alone. During the course of 2022, we are looking forward to rolling out an enhanced investment offering using our current Investment Consultants Morningstar and Portfoliometrix.

We look forward to a more positive year in 2022.

Warm regards,
John