Just finished reading a book called the Money Secret by Rob Parsons http://www.themoneysecret.info/aboutrob.asp There is no real secret – mostly it is just good old common sense with the bottom line being that your income needs to be greater than your expenses…but what was interesting is that it is a book written from a UK perspective which is unusual in that most of the finance books are written out of the US, so it gives some...

There are many reasons that people get into debt, usually they can be categorised into one of the following three: Ignorance, Indulgence, or Poor Planning Debt is often the symptom of some “other” issues but that is the subject for another post. In this post I want to look at the first category: ignorance. This is where someone has no idea of the real cost of the debt. For example, few people stop to think that the total cost...

Where there’s a will there’s a relative! The end of your life is probably not something you want to dwell on which explains why globally more than 50% of people die intestate (without a valid will). If you die intestate in SA the state steps in (according to the laws of intestate succession) and effectively decides who gets what. Under these laws, your assets will most probably eventually get to the rightful beneficiaries but there...

While trying to understand more about what it means to “manage people and their emotions around money”, I came across some interesting questions this week. One of them was this: “What is your earliest memory of money?” According to quite a few different people our earliest memories of money often play a significant role in how we view money later on in life. “It’s amazing how much the mind can play a role in...

I was chatting with a friend of mine last night who was relating a phone call he had received from his bank who were encouraging him to “move forward” to their prestige banking account and all that comes with it for just R199 per month…55 “free” transactions, help with forex, 12 free cheques (does any one still use these?) blah, blah, blah,etc, etc, etc… What amazes me is how easily people buy the...

I was recenlty approached by someone who was looking to save a bit of money for his newly born nephew…he wanted to put away R100 pm for the next 21 years or so. Not a problem I assured him – a unit trust is the way to go… However, it appears that most unit trust companies are no longer interested in the smaller amounts and now insist on a minimum debit order of at least R500 per month. There are still 1 or 2 companies that...