We fill in a lot of fillable PDFs for the Master, SARS and CIPC. The information that we need reaches us from Questionnaires that the client submits when they buy a company or a trust. I figured that if Claude.ai could read those questionnaires, maybe it could fill in the forms for us. So, I gave Claude the job. It could read the questionnaires directly from the emails and even the passports and IDs that were attached, although we had to grab those and feed them to Claude directly. OK, Claude, work your magic! Disaster! I spent days trying to…
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This is a fundamental of property investment that you need to fully understand, because it gives you tremendous power.The full statement is “The seller always WANTS to sell. The buyer must never WANT to buy.” If you don’t WANT to buy, this means that you don’t care whether the seller accepts your offer or not. There’s always another property coming on to the market. So -(1) Don’t ever forget that the asking price is always 10% above what the seller would love to sell for.(2) Go in low! Make a stupid offer.(3) Dictate the terms. For example, you must choose…
Our modified version of the game requires skill, luck and intuition. We have been playing a game almost daily for years and never tire of the challenge.Shuffle the dominoes face down. Each player picks one and the higher one starts. If you both draw the same value, repeat.The two exposed domioes are returned face down and the whole lot shuffled again.The starter and then the opponent each draw 7 dominoes and the remaining 14 are pushed to one side. They are known as the boneyard.The starter lays down a domino. If the dots add up to a multiple of 5…
This is such a common perception that one can’t help wondering how it started.Perhaps because trusts are taxed at 45%. I can think of no other reason. So let’s deal with that one.A properly constructed trust will never pay tax. Why? Because the only assets it should own are shares in companies and, possibly, non-income producing assets such as the founder’s home.Companies are taxed at 27% and that’s where all the action is. In the unlikely event that the company declares a dividend, it will be subject to 20% Dividends Withholding Tax whether it is owned by a trust or…
No, No and No again! Why not? Because AI will search through whatever trust deeds it can find, bung them all together, strip out the obvious rubbish and present the result as its own draft. That’s exactly what an attorney will do if you ask him/her to draft you a trust deed, except for the bit about stripping out the obvious rubbish. I tried it, just for fun, and I quickly recognised many of the mistakes that I see in trust deeds (and I’ve seen hundreds of them) and which led me to devote a whole chapter of my book…
Here’s a simple one that escaped me until recently.I thought that the Remember me box at log in meant remember my login details, but that’s not the case.It actually stops the time out from cutting off while you’re in the middle of something.That’s what it is there for and when it works it’s great. But, it doesn’t work on all Apps.Interestingly, while preparing this article, I came across one site that said “Don’t remember me”. I think whoever built that App meant “Don’t remember my log in details”, which indicates why the true purpose does not always work as intended.
I very occasionally run across an attorney who can both read and actually use his/her brain to interpret what he/she has read in the statutes and that happened this week. I owe this one to Cobus Welgemoed, Conveyancer who asked me this question
I always tell people in my meetings “Don’t believe anything that anybody tells you, including me!” There is so much garbage out there, often written by “experts” who are just repeating some other “expert’s” garbage. So, always ask for the source from which the opinion was drawn and then check the source yourself. I have now had to extend that to “Don’t believe anything that anybody or any AI tells you, including me!” I often ask Perplexity tax questions and I always ask specifically which sections of which Act are its source. Then, I go to those sections myself and…
I saw something coming a while back when SARS started sending out reminders to submit Provisional Returns. Although I expected it to be leading up to more Administative Penalties.Anyway here it is –
From July 1 2026 SARS has introduced a new exit form that must be completed before you fly/drive out of or into South Africa.1. You can only fill it in within 24 hours of departure, no earlier. So, logically, make it a part of your online check-in procedure.2. It is online here https://www.sars.gov.za/travellerdeclaration/.3. If you are flying in you can only complete it within 24 hours of the departure time of the last leg of your journey.4. If you don’t fill it in you can do so at the airport, but that will inevitably delay you.
Last month I talked about moving a service company into a trust. If the company owns assets, such as plant and machinery, then it gets a bit more complicated. The principal is basically the same. You register a new company and issue the shares to your trust. Then you start invoicing from the new company (increasing its value), but continue paying the bulk of the expenses in the old one (reducing its value). The old company rents the assets to the new company, and here you can play around with rentals to balance the profits and expenses to the best…
Still wondering how AI can make your life easier? Here’s a nice one discovered by Sandi in our Durban office. A client sent her PDFs with loads of cash slips photocopied onto them. All different layouts, formats and suppliers. Sandi uploaded it to Claude.ai and asked him (it?) to schedule them on an Excel spreadsheet and sum the total. Out came a detailed table showing supplier, what was purchased, when and for how much. One of the slips was duplicated and Claude eliminated that without being asked. Claude’s total agreed with that given by the client. I now use Perplexity.ai…
Admittedly, I speak to a lot of people who don’t know the difference between a shareholder and a director, but surely we should be able to expect that CIPC, who are the guardians of the Companies Act, would know the difference? But no, they don’t. Here’s a pop up that you will sometimes get when you are completing a Beneficial Ownership return on the CIPC website. They are insisting on knowing when the Directors were issued their shares! For those of you who, like CIPC, don’t know the difference, here’s a short explanation – The shareholders own the company and…
The first question is, of course, what do you mean by “wealthy”? I like my definition of being “reasonably wealthy” as “having enough passive income to be able to retire”. For us average people, there is, in my view, only one way to achieve this other than by gambling successfully and that is by investing in property. Why property? Because you can buy a R900 000 property with R90 000. You can’t buy R900 000 worth of listed shares except with R900 000. You will need about R12m to 14m invested in rental earning property to be able to retire,…
SARS is getting more and more aggressive. In early May they started hitting trusts with penallties for non-submission of annual tax returns. Then, on 6 May, we received correspondence from SARS advising that they intended to auto assess a 2nd Provisional Tax return for one of our inactive clients if it was not submitted within 10 business days. Our Customer Relations Manager (CRM) system is designed to keep our active clients informed of upcoming returns, but please be aware that we cannot accept responsibility for failing to inform you of an up-coming return because our notifications are sent as a…
The best place to start is to watch a couple of AI How to videos, because you need to get an idea of what AI is all about and what it can do for you. Think Chat GPT, Claude, Perplexity. Then sit back and think of the repetitive tasks that you or your staff have to do. You know, the ones that make it difficult not to doze off and bang your head on the keyboard. I used it to read a year’s worth of bank statements and build a cashbook in Excel. It needed some help from my side…
I registered a new company and shortly thereafter received this email from SARS Ah! That is clearly the Tax number of the new company. Great service! double click on the pdf and guess what? State secret! It would have been really funny if the password had been the tax number, but I looked up the tax number at CIPC and tried it, but no, not the tax number, not the company number, not my ID.
The shares in your company cost you R120 or R100 depending on whether we registered the company or someone else did and they are now worth R1m. Incidentally, the reason we issue 120 shares is that 120 can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, so you can have any of those numbers of equal shareholders. You now want the company to be owned by your trust. You can donate it and pay 20% Donations Tax on R1m – R150K (the Annual allowance) or sell it and pay up to 18% CGT on R1m – R120 (the…
My AI generated weekly update advises me that from 4th May 2026, SARS will be imposing monthly administrative penalties on trusts that fail to submit their annual tax returns. This was gazetted on 27 March and specifically confirms that, as is the case with companies, it will apply even when the trust earns zero income. The probability is that the penalties will be R250 per month for every outstanding tax return. Since posting this article, we have received, on 5th May, our first notification of the imposition of R250 per return for a trust. So, it’s real and it’s happening.…
I asked three AIs and the answer was consistently no. There is no mechanism enabling you to resign from the above appointments without a replacement. SARS also advised on numerous occasions that it cannot be done. They were all wrong! I was on the spot because of all the shelf companies that we sell. I have to be the Registered Representative in order to maintain the tax affairs up until we sell the company. Then I’ve had to rely on the client to undertake the onorous task of appointing themselves in my place, which they frequently fail to do. I…