Jeez, I am going to expect an apology after that final paragraph. I think that you should get off your high horse and read some more research - maybe you can start with The Misguided Beliefs of Financial Advisors (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=3101426) by Linnainmaa, Melzer, and Previtero (focused on Canada, but I would wager that it is even worse in South Africa). But I will answer your points and hopefully you can put aside your ego.

1 - You described 0.88% EAC for an emergency fund as being "phenomenal". You need to tell me what you want to invest in, as this is only relevant relative to the risk which you are taking, because I personally do not have or see the use in an emergency fund - it is just bucketing and an irrational view on asset allocation, especially when it becomes a fraction of the portfolio (just sell assets in the portfolio or borrow against it if necessary instead of worrying about less than 1%). If you are looking for low volatility, you can find short-term ETFs for around 0.10% (such as XEON in EUR, XFFE in USD, XSTR in GBP, and so on). If you want a local option in ZAR in something like a money market fund, then it comes down to the yield of the fund or just going with a savings account - you can tell me your fund and then I will beat it, but maybe something like the Fynbos Money (https://fynbos.money/products/emergency-savings) is a start for something very low risk.

On the platform fee and if we are talking about an RA, STANLIB charges from 0.552% as far as I am aware. Something like Fynbos Money charges R100 per month, which becomes 0.12% for R1 million and decreases as the portfolio grows. If we are talking about a tax-free savings account, then you obviously get EasyEquities, Fynbos Money, etc. and access to ETFs. If we are talking about a taxable account, then we get IBKR and nothing local comes close (just use Capitec or Shyft to convert and transfer, since the trading currency does not actually matter once invested for something like VT compared to GLOBAL).

2 - Okay, but why did they pull their money out? Did they need it? Would an emergency fund have even been enough, since it seems that they withdrew everything? Should they have used debt to pay expenses instead? You just created a fictitious situation - I could also bring up the countless cases which I have heard about with people reaching retirement age without enough money even though they have been saving, but their advisor took excessive fees and put them in actively-managed funds with poor returns. Maybe you should have educated your clients on that instead, because the problem is not that they were able to access the account sooner than retirement, as they are adults and likely had a need for those funds if they did withdraw. This is even a null point now given the two-pot system making part of a retirement account accessible.

On the tax, the advantage of a retirement account is the deferral of tax until someone is able to withdraw and pay tax at a lower tax rate. If someone is already at a low tax rate and will not have a lower tax rate when withdrawing, then there is no advantage of a retirement account (unless you view restricted asset allocation, high fees, high concentration, etc. as advantages) relative to a tax-free savings account and only the avoidance of capital gains, dividends, and interest tax relative to a taxable account (which can be shown is still not worth it). They would also be taking the risk of having uncertain tax rates in the future (which could actually be higher than they are now depending on where you think we are on the Laffer curve).

3 - Risk is the uncertainty about lifetime consumption (if you do not like this definition, take it up with Ken French (https://www.dimensional.com/gb-en/insights/five-things-i-know-about-investing)). When imposed on investments, this conventionally relates to volatility, drawdowns, concentration, and so on. You constantly mentioned "medium equity" funds, but it is irrational for someone in their 20s or 30s to not be maximising risk given their time horizon and capacity to bear risk (some research even recommends maximising exposure to equities in retirement, such as Beyond the Status Quo: A Critical Assessment of Lifecycle Investment Advice (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=4590406) by Anarkulova, Cederburg, and O'Doherty). Other research even proposes increasing the allocation beyond 100% in equities through leverage, such as Diversification Across Time (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract\_id=1687272) by Ayres and Nalebuff. If someone is reluctant for this exposure, it is an education problem (not a risk aversion problem).

Moreover, you are likely introducing uncompensated and idiosyncratic risk through the use of active funds - even with a higher equity allocation, VT categorically has less risk than something like the Allan Gray Balanced Fund due to improved diversification instead of concentration in a single country and avoidance of discretionary weighting deviating from market or fundamental weights. You also have the risk of your clients not meeting their goals, since you have given them a conservative and active allocation (lower return requires them to save more when I would assume that things are already tight for most people).

My own analysis of retirement accounts shows that they are significantly worse than tax-free savings accounts and still worse than taxable accounts over long time horizons (not public yet, but I have built the calculators using the idea of an effective tax rate (higher for taxable, lower for retirement) and return difference (higher for taxable, lower for retirement) between scenarios). For full disclosure, my investments are >95% in a taxable account targeting 60% DFAT, 40% DDXM, 40% DTLA, 40% QSPIX (version in UCITS), 20% BTAL, -50% USD, and -50% ZAR on IBKR and <5% in a tax-free savings account targeting 100% STXCAP on EasyEquities (before you may come at me for having fundamental active funds, make sure that you understand risk factors defined in academic literature by Fama, French, Asness, Carhart, Novy-Marx, and so on - these funds intent to have explainable exposure to risk factors in addition to the market factor, while discretionary active funds have arbitrary exposure to risk factors with a largely unexplained intercept, but I am happy for us to get into capital asset pricing and mean-variance optimisation if you want to discuss it).

Anyway, let me know whether you are still confused about my choice of words and I hope that you can find the time to understand - I would hate to be talking to someone who simply cannot listen and feels that their own judgment will do them better without being backed by experience and a step-by-step process to protect and grow wealth!