Anyone living in Cape Town and with a bit of spare cash and a pre-paid electricity meter would probably do well to buy electricity before the 25% increase on the 1st July. By doing this you will effectively be buying electricity at a 25% discount to the new price…a tidy return on your money indeed. A couple of caveats first though: You need to make sure that you remember to at least “top-up” your account each month to pay...

I was chatting with a friend this morning about finances and budgetting and all that goes with that and it struck me again that there is no magic formula when it comes to money! It is just good old common sense. And in the case of bugetting, often a bit of hard work and discipline (not necessarily things we like to hear). Most people who battle to keep their income greater than their spending seem to be looking for a magic wand to wave that...

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...