The two-stage FIRE approach (#208‪)‬ The Fat Wallet Show from Just One Lap

If you went into formal employment straight out of university or school, odds are you have some sort of pension fund or retirement annuity. You may since have realised the idea of working until you’re 65 is entirely optional. If you’ve already allocated a large part of your income towards your retirement, you need to find a way to incorporate that money into your early retirement strategy. 
Our friend Kris has been giving some thought to this process. Your challenge lies in balancing two investments. Your discretionary investments should see you through to the age where you can access your retirement fund. The longer your discretionary investments can support you, the longer you can wait before accessing your retirement product.
Once you start tapping into your retirement fund, you need to manage your draw-down rate carefully, so you don’t run out of money before you run out of body.
In this week’s show, Simon and I discuss the merits and pitfalls of this strategy. In general we find it to be Very Good.
Kris
I have some questions I thought to send to you guys about a two-stage FIRE - which is very relevant to SA since we cannot access Retirement Funding (Pensions, RA's) until a certain age. The USA (where more FIRE content comes from) is different since they have some hacks where you can "convert" retirement funding to income before you hit that age. I am surprised its not a bigger topic in the SA FIRE community. 
I had the idea for the two-stage path to FIRE and developed an approach - which basically means accumulating a large enough discretionary investment (DI) pot to last until your retirement funding (RF) income kicks in (say at age 65). This means the DI can be drawn down at a rate higher than 4%, since it need not be as large as 25x annual expenses - it just needs to last until formal retirement age. 
In the background however - your RF needs to grow from the day you stop working to a level that will satisfy the 4% rule at retirement age.
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I'm new to the investing world, and it's pretty exciting. I'm also an active investor in the Netherlands via DeGiro. I’ve been lucky enough to join two online investor groups. These online groups are hosted on a site called Discord Chat. It’s pretty awesome, because everyone can interact and there's a whole lot of Q & A involved. 
I've learnt SO much in the 3 weeks I've been in these groups and I think it could be so beneficial for young South-Africans to share their experiences with each other. The chat allows for different categories (i.e medical aid, insurance, passive investing, personal finance, active investing) and categories like "idea's" where people can share topics on which they want more info on. 
Hope you think this is pretty cool too - and that we can start an awesome online community of people passionate about personal finance. 
Peter
I have excess cash in my savings account and want to invest in an ETF. Is it the right time now?
I have been looking at the Allan Gray Balanced Fund which has a nice diversification and 51% SA equities and 29% foreign and is at an all-time low but the 10 year prediction looks good.
I am also looking at the Satrix capped INDI ETF which is equities-heavy and also at an all-time low but the 10 year prediction also looks very promising.
I'd rather invest now than having my money sit in the bank. In these uncertain times, what do you suggest I do?
Darth
To curb my wife's over-reliance on me for income (for her stokvels and cosmetics), we constructed backrooms and for the majority of the Tax Year, they were bringing in R2 200 per month and that has since increased in January 2020 to R4 500.
All this money goes to my wife's account and the intention is to have it declared as her only income for the Tax Year.
My question is whether SARS would rather have us splitting th