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 ...

Diversification is an important part of risk management in a portfolio. Unfortunately, as with all things finance, there’s no simple diversification solution. This week, we address two diversification concerns: being too diversified and not being diversified enough. In my own portfolio, I pay attention to three diversification criteria, namely assets, regions and sectors. Since I ...

I’ve only ever known debt as the wrathful destroyer of wealth and happiness. Lately, however, I’ve come to realise debt can be a powerful tool in your financial arsenal - if you treat it with respect. Someone recently explained the logic behind maxing out his child’s tax-free account instead of saving for her education. If ...

I learned a lot of important financial concepts from the FIRE (financially independent, retire early) movement. The most useful is the difference between retirement and financial independence. The days of companies supporting retired employees in retirement are a distant memory. If you are plugged in to your finances, this is great news. It means there’s ...