The personal finance lessons we can all learn from 2023

CatalystInvestment, Lifestyle, Planning, Retirement

As the year hurtles towards its close, signs of the festive season are emerging – Christmas decorations adorning storefronts, and the cheerful melodies of holiday tunes resonating through retail spaces. Despite the hustle and bustle of the approaching “silly season”, the end of the year is a good time to reflect on the financial journey of the past year and …

With the world on fast-forward we cannot afford to be left behind. We need new social contracts that bring new options and better solutions

CatalystInvestment, Lifestyle, Planning

When will our lives get back to normal? They won’t, because normal was the problem. Our lives function on social contracts between citizens and their government. These are broken. They have been for a while. It has nothing to do with the coronavirus. This has been developing for a few years. The world needed change on many fronts. The pandemic …

Old-gen vs new-gen RAs, and why they matter

CatalystInvestment, Lifestyle, Planning

An old-generation retirement annuity fund (RA), which is policy based, is vastly different from a new-generation unit-trust based RA. Abdallah Moosa, a planner and actuary at Cape Town-based wealth management company Fiscal Private Client Services, says RAs fall under the category of retirement funds (including pension and provident funds).https://6b793fb1412da224cba5baa6a5972065.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html “They are essentially a ‘personal retirement fund’, and contributions are typically …

Take control of your finances in uncertain times

CatalystInvestment, Planning

American professor of mathematics, John Allen Paulos is attributed with saying ‘uncertainty is the only certainty’. This is true for job security, future working environments, and even if Manchester United really are title contenders again! If uncertainty teaches us one thing, it is that we can control only what is within our control. Duann Cronje, a Certified Financial Planner at …

Finding the road to recovery

CatalystInvestment, Planning

Who would have thought that 2020 would be a strong year for investors? In the depths of the COVID panic the term ‘depression’ was bandied about by many, a reset of the financial system in its entirety. Sentiment in our country was at its lowest as businesses shut and jobs were lost, with our government scrambling to source funding to …

Making a case for offshore investing

CatalystEducation, Investment

State capture, corruption, land expropriation without compensation. These are all terms that have become part of the South African lexicon and part of our daily reality. According to the recent 2020 Bloomberg Misery Index which ranks major economies by inflation and unemployment expectations, South Africa is the third-most miserable economy in the world. Not surprisingly, the Rainbow Nation’s economy is ranked only after …

Making a case for offshore investing

CatalystInvestment

State capture, corruption, land expropriation without compensation. These are all terms that have become part of the South African lexicon and part of our daily reality. According to the recent 2020 Bloomberg Misery Index which ranks major economies by inflation and unemployment expectations, South Africa is the third-most miserable economy in the world. Not surprisingly, the Rainbow Nation’s economy is …