When I finally paid off my debt three years ago, I was in the perfect position to start building wealth. It took two stark years to get out of a very dark place of my own making. No salon visits, no new clothes and a helluva lot of peanut butter later had me looking a ...

I’m a big believer in having an emergency fund that will cover my expenses for at least three months. I don’t want too much cash sitting around doing nothing, but I also want to avoid cashing out investments to cover emergencies. My emergency fund creates an interesting dynamic in my personal finances. Because I have ...

This podcast forces me to do an annoying amount of personal growth. This week I had to work out what I disliked more: being wrong or being irrational. My early 20s was a haze of red wine and shopping on credit. In three short years I managed to rack up debt ten times my monthly ...

WARNING: This episode contains some insipid moralising. Vomiting might ensue. Please allow me a moment to be a little philosophical. It’s my birthday week. This can be your gift to me. Last week I featured the NewFunds NewSA ETF. It’s an ETF that invests in companies based on their empowerment ratings. As our bestie Nerina ...

Fat Wallet listener Kennith Brand asked us to unpack the advantages and disadvantages of endowments. In this podcast, Simon and I try to wrap our heads around what these products are, why they’re offered by insurance companies and whether you should be putting your money in them. Regular listeners will be unsurprised to find that ...

Until now, most episodes of The Fat Wallet dealt with investment concepts. When it comes to money, however, smaller personal finance choices can arguably have a much more profound impact on your financial well-being. We address this often when we talk about keeping your lifestyle costs in check. Super fun #fatwallet recording with @dineo_t @p2the3tri ...

We spend a lot of time at listening to debates on whether low-cost index investing is better than paying someone to manage your money. During these debates, there’s invariably a chart that compares the performance of a fund against an index. The problem is that fund returns aren’t always represented in the same way. Sometimes ...

Are share buybacks an indication that a company is trading on the cheap, or a sure sign that management has run out of good business ideas? In this episode of The Fat Wallet Show, I try to figure out how share buybacks affect investors. From time to time, a company will buy and destroy some ...