We just installed a petrol generator from Adendorff Machinery Mart (to replace the diesel brute that my neighbour complained about). Now we only have 5Kw to play with instead of 25, so I drew up a chart of what can be on at any one time. It proves possible that we can still survive an extended power outage and we don’t switch off our fridge or two freezers. However, the geyser pretty much has to run entirely on its own except for lights and computers. We had to engage an electrician to make sure that everything that we wanted on…
Author: zombie
My lovely wife, Helen, is passionate about sewing. This means that just about all the available storage space in the house is taken up by fabric and with the fabric comes thread (at least four reels of each colour). Reels are not an easy thing to store so they have ended up rattling around in drawers, so here’s what I did – That’s storage for about 3 000 reels! Now that meant that I had to drill about 3 000 blind holes properly spaced and of equal depth and I also had to cut 3 000 dowels, all exactly the…
Let’s start with the words first and see what they mean – Usufruct is the right to make full use of an asset without ownership. So, if you have the usufruct over a property, you can live in it, rent it out, holiday in it, but because you don’t own it, you can’t sell it. Bare dominium is quite simply ownership without the right of use (usufruct). So, if you have bare dominium over a property, can you sell it? Only with the consent of the usufruct holder, otherwise you would be depriving them of their right. Now, put usufruct…
My wife, Helen and I have debated this quite often. For me it is a strong driver, for her it is a cop out justification. Her argument is that people should best live within the norms of society and not “do their own thing” which could involve crime, drugs, hurting others etc. I agree with her entirely, so it all boils down to how one reads the meaning of the expression “Unto thine own self be true”. I read it as meaning that your inner guide is the best guide to being a better person. There are those of you…
How do you get from where you are at to where you want to be? First off, you find out where you are at. You can’t get to Capetown unless you know that you’re starting from Poffadder. Then you choose your route. If it’s complicated, you’ll write it down, or have Google Maps or Waze spell it out for you. Then you start out on the journey. Do you check occasionally to ensure that you’re still on track? I think that would be a good idea, don’t you? What happens if you take a wrong turn? Well, if you’re using…
For most people, it doesn’t matter what they earn, they will always be short. Why is this? Why do so many of us go through life always worrying about money? One of the causes is what is called “standard of living”. All that means is that when you earn more you choose to spend more. Another is that the more we earn, the more we commit to spend and this is the kicker. If there was no commitment (to pay the bond, the rent, the car instalments, the private school fees), then if we found ourselves a bit short one…
Sometime back I posted “Plan to live forever”. You have to do this when financial planning because you do not know when you’re going to die, so you can’t plan to spend your last cent on your coffin. I noticed in the latest copy of Fitness magazine an article entitled “How to live forever” and that naturally cuaght my eye. so here’s how (according to them) – 1) Regular exercise 2) Balanced diet with frequent small meals 3) One glass of red wine each day 4) Regular exercise of the brain 5) Sex at least twice a week (!) I…
You may hear on the radio “The opportunity cost of holding gold is ……” So what is “opportunity cost”? Simply put it is the result of doing one thing that precludes you from doing something else more profitable. And the amount of the “cost” is the difference between the benefit that you get and the benefit that you could have got. Let’s take an example – I have say, R1m to invest. I put in in a FNB a call account for a year and earn 6% which is R60 000. But I could have bought unit trusts and earned…
I wonder about synchronicity, telepathy and coincidence. So very often I will, for come reason, be thinking of someone who has been out of my mind and my circle of activity for months or even years. Typically this would be in the early morning while I’m preparing to leave for the office. I’ll get to work and sometime in the morning that person will phone me. I believe that this happens too often to be coincidence. So if not coincidence, what is it? Some people will call it synchronicity. So what is synchronicity? It’s a term first introduced by Carl…
I know I’ve said it all before, but it’s worth saying again – Don’t ever accept where you’re at as being the best you can do, always, always strive for change, improvement, excitement damnit! Don’t just think out of the box. When you think out of one box, you just end up in another, bigger, box. That’s OK so long as you know that’s the case. So long as you don’t think you’re actually outside the box! Now, how do we do this? How do we get ourselves thinking and then achieving the impossible? By dreaming it, that’s how. I’ve…
This was part of the headline on the news after the last meeting of the reserve bank. The rest was “Bad news for pensioners” Now why would holding the Repo Rate steady be bad news for pensioners? It can only be because they fell into the grips of a financial advisor who sold them product which produces passive income based largely on interest. A bank, for instance. Do you hear those bank adverts? “My baby”, “Watch your money grow”, rubbish like that? If a bank pays you 6 1/2% interest (and most of them don’t), then they are offering you…
I recently wrote a post called By all means copy me Now I’m going to get quite specific. We are talking about so called professionals here. “Professional” attorneys and accountants who have no principals and no pride and bring their peers into disrepute. I have in front of me two trust deeds. One prepared and sold to their client by a banking institution (let’s call it the “mother”) and another by an accountant (let’s call it the “child”). I received the child for review first and after a read through, decided that it was such rubbish that I could not…
So you don’t want to pay tax? That’s easy – don’t make any money! I love paying tax, because the more tax I pay, the more money I made. Of course, that’s after we have worked our magic and saved us as much tax as we legally can. And then we still pay a lot of tax? What a pleasure! One of our clients accidentally made a bad mistake with one of their companies. The accounts they submitted to us only included 9 months’ profit and their tax return was submitted on that basis. SARS issued the dreaded IT14SD. Following…
The older you get and the longer you’ve been in the job, the less likely you are to respond well to change. And what happens? Change happens! And you are fast becoming a dinosaur. So why do we resist change? Isn’t it something to do with comfort zones? Even success can become a comfort zone. You build a company, you give great service, you charge commensurately high prices, you get money in the bank, you build your property or investment portfolio, everything is going great. Do you change anything? Do you constantly search for new ideas, new ways to improve…
SARS is smart. Smarter than you! There’s hardly a business or business person that has not slipped up in some way at some time with their tax affairs. After all you cannot be expected to know all of the taxation laws in detail and even if you did, you couldn’t possibly keep up with the frequent changes. Sometimes one change deletes a previous change even before the previous one came into effect. Other times one change amends a previous one before the previous one came into effect. This happened with Dividends Withholding Tax. It was promulgated at 10% and signed…
It happened to me again. I felt let down and cheated by someone I totally trusted. This had happened before with someone else and I had forgiven him – completely. Those of you who have read (and re-read) Andrew Matthews’ great cartoon illustrated books (we keep all three on our reception coffee table) will recall Andrew saying that life will throw lessons at you in the form of small pebbles. If you ignore them, you’ll get bricks, and if you ignore them you’ll get a great big boulder on your head and then maybe you’ll learn the lesson that the…
You remember your schooldays or your early working days? You’d come up with a great idea, start putting it together, maybe even taking it to market, then someone would copy you! How bad was that? How dare they? Now, you imagine that nobody ever copied you. Why would that be? Because you didn’t do anything worth copying, that’s why! So how does that make you feel now if someone copies you? You should feel honoured and invigorated to keep coming up with new ideas since you’re obviously a person worth copying. One of my clients and his two siblings bought…
You so often hear the big corporates saying “We welcome competition” when they are threatened by someone like Wallmart or Cell C or the like. What they’re really saying is “We’re scared as all hell, but we don’t want you to know it”. But if you give it some thought, you will probably agree that competition really is good for you. Why? If for no other reason than that it shakes you up, makes you think and gets the old creative juices flowing. After all, who is going to innovate if they control the market? And it’s not only competition…
If you think you can or you think you can’t, chances are you are right. (Henry Ford). OK. Try this one. Run through in your mind all the people you know. Try to find someone who succeeded in achieving something despite believing that they couldn’t. Find anybody? Unlikely. Now search for people who are unhappy with where they are at, who envy where others are, who wish they had other peoples’ luck. Find anybody? Plenty. Thinking you can is not becoming a wannabe, a starry-eyed dreamer (although dreaming dreams is powerful if used properly), it is what it says it…
No, I don’t believe in psychokinesis. At least not the repeatable type apparently practiced by Yuri Geller, but I do believe in the power that the mind has over itself. That’s why I love graphs. They help my mind control my mind. Let me explain – My PA, Thuli, says that the reason that I am so slim is that I have the right genes. She’s right, I am blessed with “slim” genes. But what she does not acknowledge is how hard I work to stay slim. Weight training 5 days a week, 5 small meals a day, all the…