Planning early is key to a good retirement

It’s never too early to think about retirement. In fact, the sooner in your life you prepare for it, the more benefits you will reap when the time does come, and the more you will be able to live the life you love.

Take for example restaurateur and celebrity chef JP Anglo and Happy Skin Cosmetics CEO Jacqueline Yuengtian-Gutierrez. They are both young, and are busy with their respective careers and families, but they also believe in the importance of preparing for the future. 

Anglo imagines a future that revolves around family and his passion for cooking. “Ultimately, I want to cook for free and for the ones I love,” he says. This dream follows an already successful career of hosting his own travelling cooking show Hungry with Chef JP, and opening a string of well-known restaurants such as Sarsa, Kafe Batwan, Mai Pao, and Liberation Shawarma.

However, the road to success was bumpy for Anglo. After early failures and the closure of their family-owned Chinese restaurant in Bacolod, he decided to enroll at the prestigious culinary school Le Cordon Bleu in Australia to prepare him for a career in the restaurant industry. After five years, he came home equipped with the necessary know-how and the decision to start anew.

Gutierrez, on the other hand, left her high-paying job to take on an even bigger challenge of becoming an entrepreneur for her family. Balancing the demands of a corporate career in the ultra-competitive world of fast moving consumer goods with the needs of a growing family was not ideal for the young mom. “I left my corporate job because I wanted to have the freedom of spending quality time with my family,” she says.

Thus, she used her corporate experience managing skin care brands to open her own, award-winning make-up line – Happy Skin Cosmetics. Although for the motivated Gutierrez, there’s still room to grow her family and business. “I’m thinking about the succession of my business. I also want to be there for my kids while they grow up,” she adds.

 To help people prepare for retirement, AXA Philippines launched Retire Smart, an investment and insurance plan designed to help Filipinos strategically build a retirement fund that also comes with life insurance coverage for protection from life’s uncertainties.

“Currently, only one in ten Filipinos is retirement-ready,” says AXA Philippines Wealth Management Director Tony Isidro. “We want to change that figure to ten out of ten. Retire Smart helps customers build a future fund so they can live what they love upon retirement.”

Visit axa.com.ph to learn more.

ABOUT THE AXA GROUP The AXA Group is a woldwide leader in insurance and asset management, with 166,000 employees serving 107 million clients in 64 countries. In 2016, IFRS revenues amounted to Euro 100.2 billion and IFRS underlying earnings to Euro 5.7 billion. AXA had Euro 1,429 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2016. The AXA ordinary share is listed on compartment A of Euronext Paris under the ticker symbol CS (ISN FR 0000120628 – Bloomberg: CS FP – Reuters: AXAF.PA). AXA’s American Depository Share is also quoted on the OTC QX platform under the ticker symbol AXAHY. The AXA Group is included in the main international SRI indexes, such as Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) and FTSE4GOOD. It is a founding member of the UN Environment Programme’s Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) Principles for Sustainable Insurance and a signatory of the UN Principles for Responsible Investment. ABOUT AXA PHILIPPINES AXA Philippines is a joint venture between the AXA Group and the Metrobank Group, one of the country’s largest financial conglomerates. AXA Philippines is the second leading life insurance company in the country, with P21.6 billion in gross premium income reported in 2016, and over 811,000 customers protected under various individual and group life insurance products. Most recently, AXA Philippines announced its entry into the non-life insurance business with the acquisition of Charter Ping-An, the fifth largest non-life insurance company in the Philippines.