Preservation funds and FIRE (#189‪)‬ The Fat Wallet Show from Just One Lap

Boy, did AJ open a can of worms this week! We fall down a preservation fund rabbit hole that’s perhaps long overdue. Here are some of the key things you should know. 
When you leave a company’s pension or provident fund because you leave the company, you have three options when transferring those funds:
You can move it to your new company’s pension or provident fund. You can buy a retirement annuity (RA) in your private capacity. You can put that money into a pension preservation or provident preservation fund. Both pension and provident funds are Regulation 28-compliant products offered by employers. They differ in one important way: with a provident fund, you can withdraw the full amount in cash at retirement. If you hold a pension fund at retirement, you can only withdraw one-third in cash. The rest has to be reinvested in a living or life annuity. 
A pension preservation or provident preservation fund is designed to hold on to the money you saved when you were employed with your company. It’s also a Regulation 28-compliant product, but once you move your retirement money into a preservation fund, you can no longer contribute to that fund. 
If you have a pension preservation fund and your new company has a pension fund, you can move that preservation fund to your new company’s pension fund. If you have a provident preservation fund and your new company has a provident fund, you can move your preservation fund to your new company. 
All this complicated moving around of money makes one wonder why you wouldn’t just transfer your money into a retirement annuity (RA), right? 
It turns out, by law you can make one full or partial withdrawal from your preservation fund before retirement. The first R25,000 is tax-free. After that you are taxed according to the table below. 
At this point you might be wondering why AJ is under the impression that his first R500,000 would be tax-free when he is retrenched.
In this idea he is right and wrong. If he got a new job, contributed to his new employer’s pension or provident fund and got retrenched, he would be able to retire out of the new fund upon retrenchment using the R500,000 tax-free withdrawal he would have received upon retirement. 
He can only withdraw from the fund to which he was contributing with his new employer, so if he didn’t transfer his preservation fund to his new employer, he’d be taxed on that withdrawal. The other snag is that it affects the tax-free amount he can take upon retirement. If he withdrew R100,000 tax-free upon retrenchment, he’d only have R400,000 tax-free money left when he retired.
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When you financially emigrate SARS makes you pay CGT on all your investments worldwide as if you had sold them on that day. Ok, fine, but I haven't actually sold them, and one day, when living in my new country I will want to sell them. 
But then the new country is going to want tax on the profits, presumably calculated from the actual base cost. I'm not sure how to avoid paying tax twice in this situation. Unless I actually sell the investment when financially emigrating, and buy it again at a new base cost after this process is done, which seems like a waste because of fees, spread and spending some time out of the market.
We asked our Head Elf De Wet about this. He has good news.
Typically the country to which you are emigrating has legislation (if their tax system is advanced enough as is the case with South Africa) that will deem the base cost in the new country to be the re-acquired base cost (not the original) and it should therefore not result in double taxation. It can in very few circumstances result in double taxation, but the chances are very slim.
AJ 
After I resigned from my previous employer, I moved my Provident Fund money to a Sygnia Preservation Fund.
I chose this option to follow the ‘’Tax rules’’. I no long