I recently spent about R80 000 on tiles at Italtile. Their product and service was excellent. One of the products was made specially for us by a subcontractor of theirs. He had to cut up tiles of three different colours and stick the bits onto a backing fabric so that our tiler could lay them in a decorative line around our pool. I specified the colour arrangement as white, dark, grey. The sales consultant wrote it down wrongly but I spotted that and got him to write it again. Then I made sure that he crossed out his original sequence.…
General Interest
So you are married in Community of Property. Damn! That means that if one of you gets sequestrated (bankrupt) you both go down together. Very romantic, but totally unnecessary. Antenuptial Contracts – An expensive safety net The good news is that you can convert to an Antenuptial Contract (I suppose it is called a Post-Nuptial contract, but the effect is the same). Convert your wealth to separate estates We can’t help you, but my attorney client and friend, Dino Tserkezis of KG Tserkezis Inc (dino@kgt.co.za) advises me that if you are married in Community of Property, you can apply to…
Lawyers are now required by law to write contracts and documents in plain language understandable by the persons who are expected to be reading them. So you should no longer be seeing terms like “pro non scripto” (as if never written), “supra” (above), “mutatis muntandis” (substantially the same) and especially “domicilium citandi et executandi” (place for serving legal notices). I remember on University rag day when I nearly had my trousers pulled off (it was called “de-bagging”). I fought like the very devil and eventually the opposing mob backed off!. Now I know how the attorneys must be feeling. They…
So you’re getting married. Congratulations! You’ve (correctly) been advised to enter into an anti-nuptial contract, probably under the accrual system. Remember anti-nuptial means before the nuptials not after, so you must get this done before the wedding. In the contract, you are each required to disclosed the amount of wealth that you are starting off with. What if you don’t want all and sundry to see that figure? Then I suggest that the one with the lower figure discloses their assets as zero and the one with the higher figure discloses their assets as the difference between the two. So…
Ever wonder why the moon always faces us? Why doesn’t it spin like just about every other thing up there? My physics teacher at school told us that the moon did spin but at exactly the same rate as it went around the earth and that was why it always faced us. I didn’t believe him. I got it figured eventually. Let’s assume that the moon is perfectly spherical and of uniform matter throughout. Its centre of gravity would be dead centre and it would still be spinning (even if none of that was perfect) because there would be nothing…