At age 37, Patrick Mckay had amassed enough assets to sustain his lifestyle without ever having to earn an income again. In the biz, this is what we call financial independence.  The Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement has enabled many younger people to think differently about their expenses and assets. Even if you love ...

Compiling a financial plan before you earn an income or when you have very little is ideal. You can’t afford any bad financial habits yet and your cost of living is probably as low as you can get it. As it happens, those are the two most important ingredients to rocking your finances. Generally, our ...

I grew up with the idea that you can lose “all your money” in the stock market. I’m sure many people did. Movies about the stock market don’t do much to put us at ease - if it doesn’t end with someone losing their last penny, it’s not very entertaining. This week, Nadia got us ...

If you are earning money, you probably know you should have an idea of where your money should go and why. Most of us avoid drawing up a financial plan because we think we don’t know enough to make good decisions. For some reason, the head-in-the-sand approach is the only comfortable thing about money when ...

We don’t recommend jumping into your first investment before you have your financial house in order. The humble emergency fund is at the heart of any good financial strategy, followed by insurance. At the beginning of your financial journey, you don’t have many assets. When you’re starting out, whether it’s getting a handle on debt ...

Before we begin, please take a moment to complete our survey. It would really help us out. Investing is daunting because there are no clear answers to basic questions like, “How much money do I need?” or “Am I on track?” To make matters worse, financial institutions like to exploit our limited knowledge on the ...

The sad thing about the work we do is that it has a 0% sexy rating. Once you understand the five financial concepts we keep harping on about, it becomes easy to figure out the rest. The things we invest in won’t make you rich overnight. If it did, we would be sipping champagne cocktails ...

Sometimes we say you should move your investments, sometimes we tell you to stay invested no matter what. This week, we receive two questions about moving investments. We use them as examples to discuss when it’s a good idea to cut your losses and move on and when you should hold tight and wait for ...

At what point did South Africans become so obsessed with having money offshore? For a while everyone was obsessed with gold, then something about Jacob Zuma and suddenly Magnus Heystek was a thing, like a bad dream. Our friend Edwin has this ability to ask a question in a way that stretches my brain more ...

The world is changing so quickly that talking about the pace of change is starting to feel a bit clichéd. We measure optimisation and innovation by software updates, not generations. This allows us to customise our lives to a great degree. From time to time we need to check whether rules of thumb of previous ...