The journey of developing your life can be challenging on your mind and overall well-being. Prioritizing mental health can help us build the resilience we need to find fulfillment at work and in our personal relationships. Often we focus on physical health and the list of things we want to accomplish. It’s important to remember that our body and mind always work together. We need to take care of both! What is mental health? Being mentally […]
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The difference between Medical Aid, Medical Insurance and GAP Cover
It is easy to think that the terms Medical Aid, Medical Insurance and GAP Cover refer to the same thing. Although they all serve to help you afford medical care, there are some subtle differences. Getting a clear understanding of these words will help you get savvy with your options. If you already have health coverage you’ll be more informed about the benefits and extent of your health plan. However, many of us sign up for […]
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How much is enough?
Medical aid (including insurance products) contributions need to form part of our overall financial planning. Every year these products are adjusted slightly – both in how much they cost in monthly premiums and in what they cover. These increasing costs can feel burdensome and unnecessary to those who seldom use their medical cover, but they remain a crucial part of our financial planning. Unforeseen medical expenses can completely decimate our savings and future opportunities if we […]
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Happy starts with me
“Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.” – Ayn Rand Everyone wants to be happy. We are all united in this common worldwide goal, but how we imagine this happiness is different for each of us. It is also debatable whether or not money can buy happiness. We all know people we think should be happy, who seem to ‘have it all’, but who are unhappy nevertheless. Perhaps they want something else – […]
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How to make your problems smaller…
“All problems become smaller when you confront them instead of dodging them.” – William F. Halsey Life’s problems can be scary – and the bigger we dream, the bigger our problems seem! This doesn’t mean we need to dial back, it just means we need a strategy to approach our problems. A strategy – and a partner! As we partner with our clients, creating strategies (solutions to financial problems) takes unique forms, but the approach is […]
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Pre-Lockdown vs Post-Lockdown Spending Trends
The largest factor in our wealth creation, and our wealth protection, is our behaviour. How we choose to save and how we choose to spend are the habits that will determine if we are able to grow our money over time, or if we will erode it over time. There are other factors, certainly. We can’t forecast all the transitional events in our life, nor precisely when they will happen – so attitude and external factors […]
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Why we need losers in our portfolio
There is a strange behavioural effect where investors tend to sell winners early and hold onto losers for longer. You would think that investors would offload their losers as soon as possible and hold onto their winners so that they keep winning, but the opposite is often found to be true. This is known as the disposition effect. This effect is thought to occur because people value gains and losses differently. Specifically, people dislike losses more […]
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A foothold of financial frustration
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Albert Einstein Many of us live our lives with the same financial frustrations of our parents, because we have been taught to think in the same way. Having an adviser is a sure-fire way to start thinking differently and avoid giving financial frustrations, that may be generations old, a foothold. It would be fair to assume that when making financial decisions […]
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ETF not EFF
Not to be confused with the EFF (the South African political party or the lesser-known Electronic Frontier Foundation…), ETFs have been gaining popularity in investment portfolios for about a decade. ETFs (exchange-traded funds) were first developed in the early 1990s by Nathan Most, they offer both retail and institutional investors a great passive investment option. Nathan initially started thinking about the ETF option in this way: “I started thinking about a warehouse receipt holding the shares […]
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Don’t stop the flow
“Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.” – Robert H. Shuller One of the attributes of living in your wealth space is being able to find your flow (happy, productive, healthy rhythm) and stick with it – but when we allow problems to be stop signs, our flow will become stagnant and our journey will be frustrating. Problems will always be present, but if we can understand them as guidelines, or messengers of the wrong […]
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