Tough years lead to leaner budgets and lighter wallets. But it’s important to celebrate and the festive season is traditionally a time to enjoy and celebrate friends and family. Families and businesses host and cater for large groups of people, and the costs can add up quickly. Enjoying the holiday season during tough economic times means that we need to change our usual game plan. In addition to the material costs, being mindful of new social […]
Continue readingCategory: Blog
It’s not about wishing; it’s about planning
“It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.” – Eleanor Roosevelt Appreciate the value of putting a plan in place and not merely spending time ‘with our heads in the clouds’. As Lee Bolman says, a vision without a strategy is just an illusion. Over the last few weeks we have looked at identifying our dragons and how to confront and slay them to eliminate the risks they may pose; considered the […]
Continue reading
Taking stock and talking stocks
Anyone with a mediocre knowledge of investing will be familiar with the term “stock”. But few people are aware that there common stocks and preferred stocks. And they’re fundamentally different. Stocks have been traded for over 400 years – the first common stocks were made available in 1602 through the Dutch East India Company. They form the building blocks of our modern-day economy and have taken on personalities of their own. In a nutshell, here’s what […]
Continue reading
Three ways to survive a bear market
What do you do when a bear attacks? For many of us, we don’t live near any bears, so we’re likely to be unprepared. When it comes to a bear market, the situation is not too different. No one can predict a bear market, and for some it’s not even easy to recognise when a bear market begins and when it ends. The general agreement is that bear markets are characterized by a consistent drop in […]
Continue reading
Preparation vs Perspiration
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln It’s so easy to follow the philosophy that hard work is the only thing that will guarantee our success, but hard work on the wrong things will only leave us stiff the next day. If we focus on balancing our preparation with perspiration, we will find that our success is much closer than we […]
Continue reading
Planning reduces anxiety
We don’t plan because we fear the future. We plan because we realize we can enjoy today more by reducing the anxiety of tomorrow. Most people accept that planning offers us a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something. When we plan, we map out the possible steps of our ideal life journey before taking them. Some of our biggest fears orbit around the unknown, so if we can clarify what our future might look like, […]
Continue reading
The notebook and pencil
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” – Gloria Steinem Preparing and planning should be as much a creative exercise as much as it is considered to be a calculative exercise. If we allow our planning process to be purely a numbers game, we will struggle to become fully engaged, and fully invested, in our financial plan. As our days continue to fill […]
Continue reading
One of the worst things to plan for…
In Western culture we have become very detached from the cycle of life and death. Only those who work in specific industries will be accustomed to the fragility of life, but for most of us it’s something that will happen in the unforeseen future, so we try not to engage with it too often. The overwhelming emotional shock we feel when we lose a loved one, whether sudden or expected, is natural. Inside of this tumultuous […]
Continue reading
What lockdown taught us about wills
When lockdown happened, it happened fast. For some, there were only a few days to prepare for an indeterminate time of severe restrictions. For others, they had more to do and less time in which to do it. Travellers were stuck abroad in foreign countries and had to follow equally foreign regulations. At times like these, risk cover and emergency funding are a crucial crutch when our finances and our freedoms are crippled. Granted, few people […]
Continue reading
Fire and finance
“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near one.” – J.R.R. Tolkien Should you take dragons into account when you’re working on your financial plan? Well… only if you live near one. While this may sound like a fantastic children’s story that holds little relevance in our professional lives, it’s profoundly relevant in the context of planning when we run the risk of excluding eventualities that we […]
Continue reading