I’d like to make sure I can pay the most amount of taxes possible. I love knowing that I’m partly responsible for paying for weddings, buying coal mines and financing a really interesting news channel with completely unbiased views. It’s the best.
Said nobody ever.
Dear Investor Challenge,
Even complete fools know that you have to max out your tax free savings account every year. I’ve been doing that for three years now, and I’ve got about 96 000 money babies working for me tax free in my lovely cheap brokerage account! It’s all sitting in the DBX world ETF, but now Satrix have launched their World Developed Markets ETF which gives me the same exposure for MUCH less cost.
To me it makes sense that I should jump into them right away, but Kristia from just one lap says I need to first give it careful consideration. I think she’s quite a smartie pants, but since I’m not, I have no idea what that consideration is.
One thing to note is that I plan to withdraw everything in 15 years when I retire overseas. What should I do? Spend some of the R96 000 to change to a cheaper fund, or hang on to the DBX for the next decade and a half?
Dora the future explorer
Personally I’d recommend government, they never go to jail
This is not going to be a cheerful topic. We’re in a recession at the moment and there’s very little laughter around. The (no.) 1 person who is laughing isn’t helping cheer us up either. The mood in the country is miserable, David Shapiro from Sasfin Securities says the country is at the lowest level he’s ever seen. There are posts all over the forum complaining about how poor the JSE’s performance has been this year:
“This is a bad bad year…”
“Wow, ArcelorMittal @ R5 level and Lonmin @ R10 Level, Nice ANC nice …”
“It’s mind boggling. Almost as if there’s a committee somewhere who try come up with the most damaging own goals around.”
“Pretty damn sad that an inflation ETF is in the top 6 of the investor challenge. This must be the worst year so far for the challenge.”
“Zuma, Gigaba, PP Busisiwe Mkhwebane and Zwane are competing on who can destroy the SA markets the most. SA market up 1,9% since January while the emerging market index is up 17%”
My wife is very persuasive. Somehow she managed to overturn my one foreign holiday per year policy this year. Actually she’s done it two years in a row. Last year we had our fantastic bike trip through 5 European countries, and then a few months later we were off to Mozambique for her sisters wedding.
For the last two weeks we’ve been traveling through Chile and Argentina, and we’ve already booked our return flights to go to Portugal and Spain in September. Fortunately we don’t really throw much money away on other luxuries, otherwise we’d be totally broke. Plus, with my recent shock realisation that my imported dress collecting better half did in fact out-save me last year, I thought I’d better not argue.
Dear Investor Challenge,
We really need investment in South Africa. It’ll create jobs, stimulate the economy and drive innovation which could one day cure AIDS, Malaria and Cancer. It’ll even end the current scourge of crime we’re suffering so much under. But be warned, as fantastic as that sounds, if you do invest in South Africa I’m going to punish you.
Yes, I’m going to punish you, hard. And not in the 50 shades kind of way but really miserable pain. Exclusively to your rear pocket, where you carry your already heavily punished wallet. Of course I will still punish you for investing internationally, but it’ll be so much worse if you keep your money in SA.
But please, ignore the fact that keeping all your investments here is bad for your wealth, terrible diversification and completely ignores the efficient market hypothesis, just invest locally, it’s the right thing to do. Like paying your TV license so Hlaudi can get his next bonus or raise. Or both.
Thanks,
The South African Revenue Service.
Fees must fall, yes #feesmustfall! I actually planned this month’s blog post on a play on words regarding investment fees which must fall, over University fees which (also) must fall, but to be quite honest the University fees falling probably has as big if not a bigger impact on us than investment fees, so I’ve bumped that post on to another time.
So, let’s look at what the impact is of the whole University fee issue. You see, the students are rightly upset that they have to pay far too much in University fees. The government on the other hand is saying there just isn’t money to give free tuition, and they right, it’s pretty hard to find money when you’re throwing so much of it away on things we really don’t need, like the arms deal, nuclear power stations and of course Nkaaaanndla.
I know I’ve said it before, but for some reason it just seems that governments don’t understand basic finance. Firstly you need to make sure you spend less than you earn, and then you need to invest some of the difference. It’s my belief that the #feesmustfall movement is simply the governments lack of understanding around making an investment in it’s future. Delaying gratification now for huge rewards in future is ground zero for investing.
As you might already know, I like numbers, so let’s look at an example:
