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Retirement planning · South Africa
retire.costusworx.co.za
A retirement projection you can defend
A multi-tenant decision engine for South African advisers. It models a client’s retirement across 1,000 simulated market paths, grosses SARS income tax up inside the cashflow loop, and produces a dated, client-ready report with a full POPI audit trail — and it labels every number as the percentile it actually is, never as a guarantee.
1,000 paths · fixedHistorical bootstrapSARS PIT in-loopPOPI consent-gatedAES-256-GCM at restFund factsheet library
1,000simulated pathsfixed — never thin statistics
12cashflow periods a yearwithdrawals before returns
P10–P90outcome bandsper year, nearest-rank
2failure definitionsincome shortfall or depletion
The problem
What CostusWorx Retire is for
Advisers need drawdown-sustainability projections they can defend to a client, a compliance officer and the FSCA. Spreadsheets cannot model market-path uncertainty, cannot be audited and cannot be reproduced. Retire replaces the spreadsheet with a versioned engine, a per-tenant database and a timestamped report.
Capabilities
What it does
Simulation engine
- Historical bootstrap over SA equity, bonds, cash and an offshore-ZAR series
- Cross-asset correlation preserved — one sampled year supplies every asset’s return
- Monthly cashflow: withdrawals taken before returns, so early poor years bite
- 1,000 paths, fixed — the run-count selector was deliberately removed
- Dual failure test: sustained income shortfall, or capital reaching zero
Accumulation & deferred retirement
- Set a future retirement date and contribute monthly with annual escalation
- Income target bridged forward at inflation before drawdown begins
- Fund-linked returns locked to the sampled calendar year
- Priority-order drawdown across the asset set
Outputs & honest labelling
- Success rate reported to a whole percentage — no false precision
- Portfolio value bands P10 / P25 / P50 / P75 / P90 per year
- Delivered income bands against the requested-income line
- Median surviving years and earliest depletion year
- “Best case” and “worst case” appear nowhere in the product
Client & scenario capture
- Hard POPI consent gate — no client record without stamped consent
- Scenario: risk profile, withdrawal, inflation, term, retirement date, contributions
- Six asset types with equity / bond / cash splits and drawdown priority
- Living annuity drawdown constrained to the Regulation 28 band at capture
Fund intelligence
- Live search across ISIN, JSE code, name, manager and ASISA category
- Verified versus illustrative flagging — nothing pretends to be authoritative
- Trailing 1 / 3 / 5 year returns, risk band and TER on the scenario table
- ASISA segment classifier mapping categories onto five market segments
- Benchmark blending for manually entered index allocations
Fund factsheet library
- Factsheet PDFs ingested, checksum-deduplicated and OCR’d where needed
- Matched to funds by ISIN, name or JSE code
- Hyperlinked straight off the asset table in the client report
- Every download audit-logged for FAIS traceability
SARS tax modelling
- Income tax grossed up inside the simulation loop, not applied afterwards
- Brackets live in the database per tenant and tax year — a budget is a data change
- Standalone estimator: rebates, medical credits, effective rate, net monthly income
- Primary, secondary (65+) and tertiary (75+) rebates handled
Client reporting
- Dated, client-ready report with the assumptions printed alongside the result
- Income-by-year table and trailing performance / risk on each holding
- Shareable report link with access control
- Verdict banding in plain language at 90 / 70 / 50 percent thresholds
Practice administration
- Multi-tenant — each practice gets isolated data
- Adviser, paraplanner and practice-admin roles
- PayFast subscription billing
- Market data and fund ingestion with dry-run, change hashing and run history
In practice
How a plan is built
01CaptureClient and consent, then the scenario and its assets
02LinkAttach funds; trailing returns, risk band and TER flow through
03Simulate1,000 bootstrapped paths, tax grossed up monthly
04InterpretPercentile bands, success rate and plain-language verdict
05ReportDated client report with factsheets and a full audit trail
Under the hood
- PHP 8.5 on ordinary South African shared hosting — no framework, no Composer
- MariaDB with per-tenant isolation
- XLSX read natively via ZipArchive + SimpleXML — no library dependency
- Versioned engine: every report records the engine version that produced it
- Deterministic paths so a result can be reproduced on demand
Security & compliance
- POPI consent gate enforced server-side at client creation
- Client identifiers encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM
- Tenant isolation applied inside the query
- Factsheet downloads audit-logged for FAIS traceability
- Read-only demo tenant that declines writes with an explanation
Who it is for
- Independent financial advisers and wealth practices
- Paraplanners producing drawdown analysis at volume
- Compliance officers who have to sign the advice off
- Practices that need reproducible, dated evidence of what was modelled
On the roadmap
Wider segment coverage in the return model
Deeper fund-allocation backfill and duplicate consolidation
Extended adviser report pack
See it running, not in a slide
Live demo — six client plans, including two that do not hold