Whilst we may try our best to keep our bodies safe from the flu – we may overlook the sluggish money myalgia that can hit us around this time too! You might have financial flu… Every winter our communities are hit by different strains of coronavirus (root of the common cold and flu). COVID-19 is the latest strain that initially impacted our health systems, and then quickly affected our financial systems and virtually every other area […]

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Many of us only look at our financial plan when we receive a windfall (this is not often…) or when things go terribly wrong. It could be the loss of a job, the loss of a loved one or another crisis (like a global lockdown…). These aren’t necessarily the best times to make investment decisions or changes to our financial plans as emotions are often running extremely high during times of transitions and our stress levels […]

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Sometimes it feels like this conversation is a broken record, constantly going round and around on the same track: people the world over are feeling the financial pinch and tightening belts. It’s not just a local issue, and it’s not a new concern. A few minutes on Instagram or Twitter will reveal just how many are building their third, fourth or fifth ‘side hustle’. This is partly because our internet age has made alternative streams of […]

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As the 2020 global pandemic for COVID-19 becomes forever etched in our history, most of us will remember how the term ‘lockdown’ moved from a novelty to a serious psychological threat. At the point of writing this blog, it’s not clear just how vast and integrated the knock-on effect of lockdown will be, but for most of us it’s confronted us with conversations we’ve never had to have before. Being confined indoors, or a specific area […]

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As Nelson Mandela said, once we’ve climbed a great hill we only find that there are many more hills to climb. When you’re looking up or down the hill, it’s easy to have a skewed vision of what’s really going on. We spend more time going up and down than resting at the top; it’s difficult to hold a level head in times of turmoil. You may look at your bank statement this morning and see […]

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Do you know what’s going to happen in the markets tomorrow? Neither do we! All we know is that the markets are an opportunity to invest our money in helping the economy grow, and watching our money grow with it. That’s a really simplistic view, but it helps us extract our emotional reactions from the final decisions that we make. Should we ignore fear? Absolutely not – we should talk about it lots! That’s one of […]

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Bad market performance, government lockdowns, global epidemics and loadshedding aren’t what threaten our investing and financial behaviour. Our biggest threat is ourselves. Studies have shown that people improve substantially in financial and investment decisions as they get older. When we are young — and perhaps less secure in our financial situation — we have a tendency to be controlled by emotional biases; strong impulses that can be detrimental to our investment habits. Behavioural economists refer to […]

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When life doesn’t go according to plan, our first response will often be one of fear. Unfortunately, life generally never goes according to plan – so we encounter fear a lot! Since fear cannot be avoided, we need to develop tools to cope with it so that we can allow it a constructive space in our lives, and not let it be a destructive force if left unchecked. Hopefully, this brief article can spark conversations that […]

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Don’t avoid digital help. Whilst there are many dystopian stories about how robots will take over the world, those projected realities are highly unlikely to ever manifest. AI, big data and cloud storage can be our friend in making our life easier – which is what technology was always intended for! Granted, we can easily become disconnected from the material and relational world around us if we immerse ourselves too completely in the digital world, so […]

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Every time we say ‘YES’ to something new, it seems to just make our life more complicated down the line; more events to attend, increased responsibilities and less time to relax and do what we really want to do. Finding just the right amount of order in your life is one of the secrets to making your life easier (learning to say ‘No.’ is another secret…) Whilst we can’t just stop growing and adding more to […]

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