Quiet Art

 The Quiet Art of Leaving it Alone

Most of us start by trading time for money. We work, earn, save, and hope one day to spend what we’ve built. But the real purpose of capital isn’t to be spent. It’s to create a dependable, resilient stream of income that supports you, and ideally, outlives you.

Capital is the goose, not the egg.
It’s money you don’t harass.

The shift from earning to investing requires a psychological unhooking. You have to detach your sense of income and identity from your salary. Capital doesn’t get a monthly paycheque. It doesn’t clock in at 8 and leave at 5. It breathes (sometimes strong, sometimes shallow). That breathing is the rhythm of markets, and learning to live with it is the foundation of long-term wealth.

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Liquidity and the Problem of Forced Selling

When your capital breathes out (when markets fall) the real danger isn’t volatility. It’s being a forced seller.

Forced sales turn temporary paper losses into permanent impairment of capital. If you have to sell assets in a deep drawdown to meet expenses, you lock in losses and shrink your future compounding base. A 50 % drop requires a 100 % recovery just to break even. You’ve broken the flywheel.

Liquidity is the antidote. It’s the availability of cash when you need it, without having to sell long-term assets at the wrong time. Life doesn’t happen in a straight line. Some months cost more than others. Liquidity buys you time. It lets value reassert itself.

That’s why good planning builds buffers (cash and near-cash reserves) that cover short-term needs so that long-term capital can be left alone when it’s under stress.

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Smoothing: Turning Chaos Into Continuity

Markets and life are noisy. The challenge is not to eliminate the bumps, but to smooth them enough that they don’t throw you off course.

Smoothing is about reducing short-term volatility to create the experience of dependability. In investing, that means setting aside reserves in good years to supplement income in bad years. In personal finance, it might mean using cash buffers or conservative drawdown rates so that your lifestyle doesn’t depend directly on market swings.

The idea isn’t new. The earliest insurance contracts were designed to smooth risk across merchants whose ships faced uncertain fates. One ship might sink, another might return laden with treasure, but by pooling together they turned catastrophe into inconvenience.

Smoothing acknowledges that when we live through the same storm, we don’t all have the same boats. The boat matters. It’s what turns capital into a more reliable partner.

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Asset Allocation as Planning, Not Prediction

Most people approach investing as if it’s a race to pick winners (which asset will outperform next year?, which market will surge?). But asset allocation shouldn’t be a guessing game. It’s a planning decision, not a timing decision.

Each asset behaves differently, and understanding those behaviours helps you design around your needs.

• Cash is the most liquid. It earns little, but it’s stable. Perfect for near-term expenses and psychological comfort.
• Fixed income gives your money a salary. You lend capital to others and earn predictable returns in exchange for giving up flexibility.
• Equities represent ownership. They can provide dividends (which is a management smoothed payment for allowing your capital to be put to work) but most of the reward comes from long-term capital growth. That growth depends on what buyers and sellers agree in the future, which can be volatile.

Your personal rhythm (your spending patterns, beliefs, risk tolerance, and emotional capacity for uncertainty) should drive the mix between these assets. Get as much money a job as you, honestly and responsibly, can.

A good plan doesn’t rely on guessing when markets will turn. It ensures you can survive and even thrive through all the turns they take.

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Drawdowns and the Emotional Cost of Compounding

Every long-term investor experiences drawdowns. Those periods when the value of your portfolio falls from its peak. They are the emotional tuition fee you pay for compounding.

A 10 % drawdown feels uncomfortable. A 30 % one can feel existential. But it’s the same underlying truth: prices fluctuate more than values do.

Drawdowns only become dangerous when they trigger emotional or financial panic. When there is nothing to hold on to, and a bias to do something. The investor who sells at the bottom cements the loss and often misses the recovery. The professional who must liquidate because of leverage or margin calls loses not only capital, but the right to compound from a stronger base.

The antidote is preparation. Holding enough liquidity, diversification, and humility to withstand the cycles. Managing your expectations and knowing what you have bought. You can’t control the markets, but you can control your exposure to being forced out of them.

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Risk Cover and the Cost of Being Mortal

There’s another kind of forced sale we rarely acknowledge… the one life forces on us through illness, death, or disability.

Risk cover exists to prevent those events from derailing your capital plan. Insurance, in its truest form, is collective smoothing. You pay a small amount so that, if disaster strikes, you don’t have to liquidate assets or burden others.

For a household, life cover, income protection, and medical insurance are the equivalents of liquidity buffers. They protect your compounding engine from being interrupted. They ensure your capital isn’t sold off in distress, or that your dependants aren’t forced to.

It’s tempting to see insurance as a drag. Money spent on something you hope never to use. But it’s really just another expression of stewardship: sharing risk so that no single event wipes out years of progress.

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Mental Accounting and the Psychology of Stewardship

Money isn’t neutral. We give it stories. We separate it into mental accounts. The “holiday fund,” the “retirement pot,” the “emergency stash.” Behavioural economists call this mental accounting.

It’s not all bad. These stories help us manage complexity. A “do-not-touch” capital account can protect us from ourselves. A “spending bucket” helps us live without guilt. But unchecked, mental accounting can lead to contradictions. Hoarding cash while carrying expensive debt or chasing performance in one bucket while ignoring risk in another.

The goal is not to erase mental accounting but to align it with reality.
Think of your money in layers of time and purpose:

• Liquidity layer — cash for now.
• Income layer — investments that pay dependable returns.
• Growth layer — ownership that compounds for the future.

Each serves a role. Together, they create a structure that supports both peace of mind and progress.

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From Survival to Stewardship

Wealth creation starts with survival… earning, saving, and building buffers. But it matures into stewardship. The responsibility to protect and sustain capital so it can keep serving others.

That means learning to live with uncertainty without being ruled by it. It means having liquidity for life’s bumps, smoothing for stability, insurance for the unexpected, and an allocation plan that reflects your real world, not just your return targets.

It also means accepting that markets are noisy, drawdowns are inevitable, and value creation takes time. You don’t get paid for taking risk. You get paid for bearing uncertainty while continuing to add value.

The best investors aren’t fortune tellers. They’re patient architects building futures and designing systems that survive volatility and thrive on patience.

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The Quiet Art of Leaving It Alone

The hardest part of investing isn’t finding ideas or calculating returns. It’s doing nothing when the world demands action.

Capital grows in silence. It needs space to breathe, to compound, to recover. It doesn’t like being harassed.

So build buffers. Plan your allocations around your life, not market cycles. Smooth where you can, insure what you must, and let time do its quiet work.

Because capital that is cared for (not chased, not panicked, not forced) becomes something extraordinary.

It becomes something that releases those with it to think differently.

Three Frictions to Wealth Creation

Wealth creation is hard. Not just because it takes time, patience, and discipline... but because life itself seems set up to encourage us to spend rather than save.

Living hand-to-mouth is normal. When income arrives, the natural incentive is to use it to make life more comfortable. My wife likes to tease me about this when she notices (correctly) that I too genuinely like nice things. We met when I had chosen to dramatically cut back. Not because I’ve stopped enjoying the finer things. Restraint is not about becoming a monk; it’s about choosing sustainability, within chosen contraints, over short-term gratification. You can have the nice things, there are just different choices you then have to make.

When I left corporate life, this hit home in a surprising way. Walking into shopping centres made me almost panicky. Without the cushion of a salary, every purchase looked different. My wife has coeliac disease, so when she looks at a menu, she often sees “non-food” where others see choice. I began to feel the same in shops. The shelves no longer offered me freedom, but a reminder of limits. Living off capital is not the same as living off income. Salary feels renewable. Capital feels finite. The shift in mindset is profound. Spending Capital is firing it. Permanently. Spending a salary has options.

And yet, those frictions are not moral failings. They are natural. Just like in business, where barriers to entry and exit, or the need for scarce skills, create value, personal wealth requires overcoming obstacles. If anyone could copy a good idea instantly and for free, there would be no profit in it. The obstacles are what make the rewards possible.

In my view, three main frictions hold people back from building wealth: countries, currencies, and generations.

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Friction One: Countries

It’s tempting to only invest where you spend. It feels safer to back your home team. There have even been long stretches where staying local has paid off.

In the 2000s, investing offshore often felt painful for South Africans. Those who stayed at home were rewarded. But the last decade has told a very different story. Global diversification has been the winner.

The problem is what statisticians call the “small sample problem.” Just because a small group has a certain outcome doesn’t mean they’ve discovered the secret formula. Take the “Blue Zones”... regions where people live unusually long lives. The differences often come down to small populations, not universal truths.

South Africa is just a tiny slice of the global market. Limiting all your money to one geography magnifies risks unnecessarily. It’s not about “South Africa versus the world.” It’s about recognising scale.

I see this often with clients. They’re proud to live, work, and build here, but they don’t want all their savings tied to the fate of one economy. Investing offshore gives them an engine on the outside, a second stream of security. It doesn’t mean they aren’t contributing at home. It means they are building resilience.

Here’s the way I picture it: people must pick one job. You train, study, commit. If you choose IT in the late 1990s, you might ride the dotcom wave, or graduate into the wreckage after the bubble burst. If you spend a decade training as a doctor, only to realise you dislike the work, it’s very difficult to change. Ministers who lose their faith have the same challenge. People commit their lives to a path, and changing direction can be devastating.

Money is different. It can take multiple jobs at once. It can switch industries without retraining. It doesn’t need a job interview. That flexibility is a gift we should use. Money should not be tied to one “career path” in a single country. It should be free to pursue opportunities across the world.

It’s not about abandoning your home team. It’s about not confusing investing with sport. Loyalty is admirable in rugby; dangerous in wealth creation.

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Friction Two: Currencies

Currencies add a second layer of noise.

Every week I meet people convinced the rand is about to surge to R13 to the dollar… or collapse to R25. Both can’t be right. Yet both are said with absolute confidence. The noise is relentless.

I remember it vividly myself. Back in 1999, at Kingsmead, the Barmy Army were singing their way through the exchange rate: “six rand to the pound, seven rand to the pound…” By the time they got to ten, they had to use both hands. Today, it’s around twenty-four. They need their toes, and their child's limbs. The dollar sits stubbornly between seventeen and twenty. The swings are massive.

The temptation is to treat this like a game. Guess right, and you feel clever. Guess wrong, and it stings. But those moves are so wild, it becomes more like betting than investing.

The fundamentals are clearer: strong “hard” currencies tend to hold their value. Emerging markets need to attract capital, which means offering cheaper costs (think the Big Mac Index) and higher yields. It’s not a criticism of South Africa. It’s simply how markets work.

The problem is mistaking short-term noise for signal. Watching currencies daily is like staring at the waves instead of understanding the tide. You’ll get soaked and miss the bigger picture.

This is where the idea of price versus value matters. Currency movements put a price on something. But price isn’t the same as value. A salary isn’t worth. A headline exchange rate doesn’t tell you whether your money is truly working. Obsessing over the number misses the substance.

That’s why I always come back to my mantra: get your money a job. Don’t obsess about whether today’s rate is the best. Focus on making sure your capital is consistently at work in productive assets. Currencies will fluctuate. The discipline of putting money to work matters more.

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Friction Three: Generations

The third friction is the deepest: how we think about money across time.

Too often, we live hand-to-mouth. Every decision is filtered through this month’s income and expenses. That mindset is limiting. It keeps us locked in short cycles of survival, never building the buffers that create freedom.

Sometimes, we even make hardship into a badge of honour. The “Malibu Surfer Problem” comes up in debates about universal basic income: if people are given too much support, won’t they just “check out”? Or we say, “I had it hard, so the next generation should too.”

But why? Do we really need to punish the next generation to build resilience? Surely the point is not to make life easy, but to give them enough breathing space to build skills, pursue passions, and make better choices.

Of course, capital carries its own risks. Rassie Erasmus often reminds the Springboks that no one is bigger than the team. Wealth can fool you into thinking it’s all about you. Capital needs humility and grounding.

Becoming a parent sharpened this for me. Life narrows when kids arrive. It’s no longer about your personal ambitions; you’re on the bus now, and the bus is carrying family. Wealth creation becomes less abstract, more existential. I find myself not only trying to make good decisions, but wanting to change the filter through which my children will one day make theirs.

There’s always a touch of resentment in this... not in a bitter sense, but in the deep human wish for your children to have better options than you had. More choice. Less constraint. A bigger horizon.

I’ve seen this in my own family history. My grandfather was a farmer until the weather wiped him out. Then he built a toy factory, only to lose it in a fire. Finally, he became a financial adviser. Reinvention wasn’t a luxury; it was survival.

Most people work not because it’s inspirational, but because it provides. That’s real. But capital changes the horizon. It allows future generations to choose paths not defined by immediate survival.

Sometimes you do what you want. Sometimes you do what you must. The point of wealth is to increase the proportion of the former.

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Overcoming the Frictions

Unlike us, our money doesn’t need to stick to one job. It can take on multiple roles, across borders, industries, and generations. Where people are constrained, capital is free.

That freedom allows us to be choosy. Not all good ideas are good business ideas. But your money can be directed towards the ones that are.

The practice and mindset are simple, though not easy:

• Get out of debt.

• Get a job.

• Save consistently.

• Build a buffer.

• Start getting your money a job.

Over time, your capital shifts roles. At first, it supports you. Then it begins to match you. Eventually, it surpasses you, to the point where your spending becomes a rounding error, and the engine keeps compounding for the next generation.

That’s how you chip away at the three frictions: countries, currencies, generations. You can’t eliminate them. But you can turn them from barriers into opportunities.

Wealth creation will always involve frictions. The challenge is to put your money in motion. To get it jobs that you can’t do yourself. And in doing so, give yourself and those who follow you choices that survival alone can never provide.

Get your money a job.

Pollocks

Magic Time

Most things worth doing are hard. Wealth creation is no exception. It often feels unfair, painfully slow, and full of noise. When you hear about people who seem to have made it quickly, it looks magical. But the truth is, what feels like magic is usually time, discipline, and persistence working quietly in the background.

The challenge is that most of us don’t notice when the magic is happening. Wealth whispers. Outliers shout. We see the flashy stories of quick wins, not the quiet stories of compounding. And when you’re just starting out, especially in South Africa where inequality is visceral, the distance between where you are and where you want to be can feel overwhelming.

The Myth of 15-5-50

I once gave the “50-15-5” idea a real crack. The theory is simple:

• Save 50% of your income

• Do it for 15 years

• Invest it to earn 5% above inflation

The promise? Financial freedom in less than two decades.

But each of those numbers hides brutal realities.

• 15 years is a very short runway. Most people work 30, 40, even 50 years and still struggle to retire comfortably. To do it in 15, you either need very high earnings or very low expenses. That’s not most people.

• 5% above inflation sounds modest, but it’s aggressive. Equity markets can deliver it, but not consistently. You’ll get flat years, sometimes negative years. Over the long haul, the averages hold up. Over 15 years, luck and timing matter more.

• 50% savings is perhaps the hardest of all. It’s possible if you’re single, with no dependents, but once you add a family, extended family, or community obligations, the maths gets tougher.

The point isn’t that 50-15-5 is impossible. It’s aspirational. It’s a reminder that compounding can create magic if you’re in the game long enough. But it’s not the only path, and trying to sprint can burn you out.

Context Matters

In South Africa, this conversation is layered with complexity. Ours is the most unequal country in the world by Gini coefficient. Unemployment rates are comparable to the Great Depression, but structural. A small tax base supports a large population. Many households are living hand-to-mouth.

At the same time, we benchmark ourselves against wealthier countries. Through sport, social media, and global culture, we’re connected to lifestyles that feel impossibly distant. It’s like being pulled in two directions: face-to-face with poverty at home, while aspiring to compete on a global stage.

In that environment, dreaming about wealth can feel tone-deaf. You’re torn between wanting to lift others up and needing to secure your own future. But here’s the truth: if you never make space to build capital, you remain stuck. South Africa will only thrive if enough individuals build stability, buffers, and engines that free them to contribute more. As Rassie Erasmus once said: “Stop talking k* about South Africa. Make a plan.”

Noise, Neighbours, and False Control

One of the hardest parts of investing is separating what’s in your control from what isn’t.

People think investing is about picking the right stock. Timing the market. Outthinking the crowd. But that’s mostly noise. Returns are influenced by randomness, variance, and luck. Even bad decisions can look smart for a while. Neighbours who take reckless risks can seem like geniuses until the tide turns.

Here’s what you can control:

• How much you spend

• How much you save and invest

• The skills you build and the work you do

• Your exposure to risk (asset allocation, diversification)

• Staying in the game — not blowing yourself up with debt or speculation

And here’s what you can’t:

• Market returns in the short term

• When volatility arrives

• What your neighbours are bragging about

Salary feels safe because it’s smooth and predictable. Investing feels discouraging because it’s noisy and volatile. The trick is building a separate mental model. Money invested is not a salary. It grows unevenly, sometimes invisibly, but it grows.

Stillness helps. If you treat setbacks as random, not personal, you avoid the trap of thinking the world is judging you. Bad things happen. Good things happen. Your job is to be resilient enough to handle the bad and ready enough to capture the good.

The Roadmap to Magic Time

So what does the path actually look like? It’s not one magic formula, but a series of milestones that are worth celebrating along the way.

Stage 1: Net Worth Day (Debt Freedom)
The first big milestone is when Assets – Liabilities = Positive. That’s huge. Getting out of bad debt is step one. Use debt counsellors if needed. Swap credit cards for debit cards. Stop spending money you don’t have.

Stage 2: The Shock Absorber (Buffer)
Save 3–6 months’ worth of expenses. This is your financial shock absorber. At the same time, if you have dependents, get risk cover — life, disability, income protection. It’s a grudge purchase, but it buys peace of mind.

Stage 3: Micro-Wins (Early Capital Building)
Celebrate when your invested capital equals one year of your salary. At that point, your money is starting to “get a job,” even if you’re still the bigger engine.

Stage 4: The Magic Number (Capital x25)
The long-term aspiration is capital worth 20–50x your annual spending. At a 4% withdrawal rate, that makes you financially independent. 2.5% is a more aspirational number, because then you aren't harassing your capital and it can still grow even though it is supporting you. Either way, that’s the freedom point.

Stage 5: The Compounding Kick
The hard work is in the scrum up front. Early progress feels painfully slow. But once your money earns as much as you do, the flywheel spins faster. That’s when the magic feels real, but by then, it’s no longer magic. It’s compounding.

Wealth Whispers

The danger is thinking this happens fast. It doesn’t. The loudest stories are often the outliers: the person who “retired” at 35, the neighbour who doubled their money overnight. But most of those stories don’t end well. When things fall apart, the shouting stops.

The stories worth emulating are quiet. The teacher who invested diligently. The janitor who left millions to charity. The client who worked with an advisor for decades and quietly compounded. These are the ones that don’t make headlines, but they’re real. Wealth whispers.

Actionable Steps

The punchline is simple: get your money a job.

For most people, that means getting help. A good financial planner isn’t just a salesperson. They’re more like a therapist: someone who listens, learns your context, and helps you navigate trade-offs. Your job, your income stability, your dependents, your goals — these all shape the plan.

Here’s where to start:

1. Get out of debt. Celebrate Net Worth Day.

2. Build a buffer. 3–6 months’ expenses.

3. Buy peace of mind. Risk cover: life, disability, income.

4. Find a planner. Someone who can listen and partner with you.

5. Start investing. Pension funds, employer schemes, and your own investments.

6. Adapt as you grow. Individual → family → community.

It’s not about doing everything perfectly. It’s about chipping away, building slowly, and giving time the space to work.

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Conclusion

Magic time isn’t about quick wins or outlier stories. It’s about patience, buffers, and engines. It’s about celebrating small milestones while ignoring the noise. It’s about getting your money a job, and then letting time do what looks magical, but is actually just compounding doing its quiet work.

Wealth whispers. And that’s fine.

Capital and Labour

My first salary felt amazing. After years of being a student, suddenly there was real money in my account. It was more than my mother earned as a teacher after decades of work. That was humbling. It made me realise how strange it is that we often define ourselves by our salaries, when in truth, a salary is just the price of labour.

And price is not the same as value.

Price is set by supply and demand. It does not reflect whether the work you do is good, meaningful, or changes the world. It is just a market signal.

I had studied actuarial science, a pragmatic choice. Early on, I went to see a financial planner. Partly I wanted to test the process, since I was working in risk product development and thought I could probably do it myself. But I also wanted to see how someone else would frame my situation.

The thing that hit me hardest was this: I was the asset.

My income depended entirely on my ability to keep working. If something happened to me, the income stopped. Even scarier than thinking about life cover was the thought of being alive but unable to earn, still here, still needing money, but with the engine broken. 

At that stage, I had no dependants. But the idea that other people could rely on my salary, when I had no buffer and no engine outside of myself, was unsettling. That was the moment I understood the difference between capital and labour. Labour ends when you stop working. Capital keeps going. Without capital, you are the engine, and that is a fragile place to be.

The Hard Scrums of Inequality

South Africa is rugby-mad, and I often think about wealth like a scrum. The forwards decide whether you win the match. The backline only determines by how much. In the same way, building wealth is not about flashy tries or quick wins. It is about grinding, unseen work that sets the platform.

First-generation wealth creation is brutally hard. Many South Africans live hand-to-mouth. For them, “delayed gratification” is not about giving up luxuries, it is about giving up survival comforts. In that context, talk of Buffers and Engines can sound tone-deaf.

But if we never acknowledge this and never try to break the cycle, we remain trapped. Poverty compounds just as surely as wealth does. That is why I think of wealth-building as the work of a half-hearted warrior. You do not need to storm every hill at once. You just need to create a little bit of space, enough to start building.

For me, the Buffer is that first space. It is the small emergency fund that shields you from life’s daily chaos. It does not make you rich, but it creates silence in the noise. The Engine is the goal. It is the asset that generates income separate from your own labour. Building an Engine from nothing is slow and often discouraging, but unless we aim for it, we will never get there.

Buffer vs Engine

A Buffer is your shock absorber.

Life does not move in a straight line. Some months you spend more than you earn, other months less. Without a Buffer, those bumps knock you off track. With one, you can keep rolling.

That is why people talk about an emergency fund of three to six months’ expenses. It is not glamorous money. It pays for replacing a tyre, fixing a broken window, covering a surprise tax bill, or helping a friend in need. A Buffer does not make you wealthy. It just means one bad month does not break you.

An Engine is different. Where a Buffer absorbs shocks, an Engine provides momentum.

Engines generate income separate from your labour. They are the assets that pay you while you sleep: a rental room, dividends from a fund, royalties from creative work. For many people, the “Bank of Mom and Dad” plays this role for a while, helping with fees, housing, or start-up costs. But a true Engine is independent. It keeps paying pocket money even after childhood is long past.

The ultimate Engine would be something systemic, like a Universal Basic Income or Community Wealth Fund that guarantees a baseline for everyone. That is when you know your basics are covered, no matter what goes wrong.

A Buffer gives you confidence that you can survive the bumps.

An Engine gives you confidence that you can build a future.

The Structural Fixes

Of course, the obvious counterargument is that not everyone can save.

And that is true. Especially in South Africa, where a small tax base carries enormous weight, and millions live hand-to-mouth. Talking about Buffers and Engines can feel tone-deaf against that backdrop.

That is why structural fixes matter.

We already have elements of support, like social grants. But grants are means-tested, which is expensive in itself. The irony is that deciding who qualifies costs money. That is the elegance of Universal Basic Income. It skips the gatekeeping. Everyone gets it. Those who do not need it simply pay it back through tax. It appeals to the left because it guarantees support, and it appeals to the right because it shrinks the state’s role in micromanaging people’s lives.

The real question is: can South Africa afford it? My answer is that we cannot afford not to think about it. Affording it means wasting less, fixing potholes, keeping the lights on, building competent administration. I like the way my friend Gareth Morgan puts it: good governance is about being good at crises. We need less politics as theatre, and more politics as administration.

South Africa already has a culture of “making a plan.” We improvise. We hustle. We survive. But we also need to create space for families to build steadily, and for communities to compound progress rather than constantly reset.

Yes, inequality here is in your face. Our Gini coefficient is the worst in the world, but it is also the same as the world’s overall Gini. The difference is that here you cannot pretend it away. It is on the streets, in your neighbourhoods, part of daily life. And maybe that is an advantage. It forces the conversation.

If we can combine the resilience of individuals with the competence of institutions, then Buffers and Engines do not just become a personal dream. They become the architecture for a society where wealth is not inherited by a lucky few, but built by many.

Call to Action: Get Your Money a Job

At the end of the day, the mantra is simple: get your money a job.

But before money can work for you, you often need to stop it working against you. That is why I think of First Aid as the starting point (First Aid). Get out of debt. Stop the bleeding. That may mean hard choices, painful trade-offs, and resetting priorities. It means writing down what matters most and breaking it into small, achievable steps.

From there, it is about micro ambition (Micro Ambition). Tiny goals that add up. It does not sound glamorous, but that is the magic of compounding: small efforts, repeated, snowball into something powerful. Money makes money. That is how the system works.

So the path looks something like this:

1. Stop the bleeding by dealing with debt.
2. Secure income, since your salary is the origin of wealth. Labour is the first Ox in the scrum. It takes sweat and red faces to push forward.
3. Build a Buffer as your shock absorber against life’s bumps.
4. Feed the Engine so assets can work even when you do not.
5. Compound micro ambitions into long-term freedom.

The hard truth is that first-generation wealth creation is invisible. Compounding works in three stages. First nothing seems to happen, then progress appears slowly, and finally it becomes undeniable. The heavy lifting is always at the start.

You can fight money, resent it, or ignore it. But that only leaves you at its mercy. The better option is to learn how it works and put it to work for you. Get your money a job

pic: SA Rugby Mag

Mini-You and Real-You

Fundamental investing is treating your money as a mini version of an earning you. Applying the same “what are you going to do when you grow up” that excessively defines our life planning. Fundamental investing is getting your money a job. 

The same concepts of Financial Yoga for an individual real person apply to the legal person that is a business... and to your money that invests in businesses. Endurance, resilience, and creativity give shape and form to ideas. 

The Balance Sheet of a company provides endurance. The rock on which they do whatever they do. A strong Balance Sheet allows a company to survive. It buys time. To invest in research and development. To properly maintain what they have. 

The Cash Flow Statement indicates resilience. It breaks down how cash is used for operating, investing, and financing activities. Can the company find the liquid cash it needs, as and when it needs it? Is there the money available to do what needs doing? 

The Income Statement is a picture of the bottom-line creativity. Is what the company is doing costing more than what it is producing? Is spending under control? Is the business sustainable? 

Studying the Financial Statements of a business is similar to the financial planning of an individual. Money is more suited to the hard solvency, liquidity, and profitability ratios that weigh, measure, compare, and judge containers for wealth creation. 

The more time and space it is given to grow, the more money as a mini-you can free real-you from those constraints.

19th Century German Ledger

Stilling the Waves

Planning is not something you finish. It is the regular process of reviewing your story. A form of journaling, where you can go back and see what you thought in the past. It is difficult to plan in isolation, because that limits your sources of information and support. It is important to have someone you can speak openly to. Not as a cry for help. Not because you can't do it, are weak, or are incompetent. Because you are human. 

Invest in friends who will challenge you. Find friends who won’t challenge you, but will listen deeply. To build a sense of autonomy and consent. To build a practice and set of tools for dealing with the pulse of life that feels productive, in whatever way you choose to define productivity. So your choices resonate and build on what matters to you. 

The beauty of being human is that that is such a difficult question. The answer evolves and cannot be reduced to numbers. It certainly can’t be reduced to two numbers where you divide one by the other, compare yourself to others, and spit out a chocolate box answer. 

It is not a conversation about more and less. It is not a conversation about categorising people into good enough and not good enough. It is not weighing. It is not measuring. Planning is just practicing being alive. Consciously taking each step. Stilling the waves of anxiety. Focusing on what matters.

Life is Complicated

Life is way more complicated than any story we choose for sense-making. Stories have narrative arcs that resonate. They set the scene, then something happens, then tension builds, then there is a climax, then there is a result, and consequences, and a conclusion. There are heroes, or moments of redemption, or great insights. Within the constraints of pages, picture frames, or flames of the campfire. 

Half the art of presenting is simplifying the point you are trying to convey into three clear things. So when someone is retelling the story later, they know what they were. They know what the presentation was about. They were surprised by something that was clearly articulated and emotionally engaging, and they could remember it because it found a hook into their world. 

In real life, the narrative is hard to see unless we construct it with hindsight. Our stories layer understanding after the action. Planning becomes a tool to reflect. It is a meditation that can help give you focus. Planning allows you to step out of reality, look at reality, and then adjust the story as reality evolves. Building the capacity for change is a fundamental part of good planning. 

Planning is not about knowing the future. It is not about a specific path. It is very dependent on your decisions and ambitions.

Learning to Sit

In Yoga classes you can see students who are incredibly stiff, partly because they are fit and strong. Forget the forward bend, a lot of athletic people will struggle to simply sit at 90 degrees with their legs out straight. Releasing that tension requires unlearning. Kids are very flexible, and over time because of a lack of holistic movement, adults gradually become stiff in very specific ways. When we specialise our use-it-or-lose-it bodies. To learn, you must support your capacity to deal with change. Creating space for honest feedback cycles and reflection. Understanding yourself well enough to know how you best receive feedback. 

When I wasn’t working (for money), I was part of a Men’s Group (surrogate colleagues?) where we provided support to each other. It was difficult because we saw the world very differently, and discussion could descend into unproductive debate. One way we attempted to overcome this was developing “Cards” or tools, where you could say explicitly what you are asking for. Sometimes you want advice (what would you do?). Sometimes you just want to talk (just listen and ask exploratory questions)… we called that the “Vulnerability Card”. When you expose yourself, but you don’t want to be punched. 

There are other times when you want very direct solicited challenge. The scariest card was “Invisible Man”, when you invite others to talk about you behind-your-back in front of you, while remaining silent (and NOT defending yourself).

Deep Bench

You need support in your planning. It is all well and good to have specific goals, but we go through waves and moods, and we are not consistent. We forget why we made decisions. In specific moments, we want other things. This means we all need to know what kind of support we need. 

When you are going through difficulties, what is the kind of person you need to speak to? I am lucky that I have developed a lot of good friendships. I know that in certain situations, there are specific friends I need. Certain "cards" I need to play. Sometimes support, sometimes challenge, sometimes advice, sometimes silence. I know that to develop those friendships, I need to be available when the kind of support I am capable of is what they need. We have different strengths and weaknesses, and the deeper your bench of friendships is, the more support you will be able to provide to each other. The more space you can hold. 

The idea of holding space is that you are not there to provide a solution. You are there to listen. Having someone to hold space is not saying that you are not competent and capable. It simply reinforces the self-awareness that you know who you need to walk with in the situations you are going to face. Building that capacity is important. 

As our story changes, we need mirrors to incorporate new information. We need to realise which behaviours no longer work. Which never worked (on reflection). Which behaviours might work. We need to unlearn, relearn, and change with change.

Know Who You Need

Uncommonly Connected and Compounding

Goals are not picking the best of every possibility in isolation. That is dreaming. You can close your eyes and visit various places instantaneously. You can explore parallel universes where you made different decisions, and outcomes were completely of your choosing. When you open your eyes, you must go from where you are. 

The more realistic goals are tiny. Small nudges from where you are. Shane Parrish suggests, “Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you are smarter than you are.” 

You can build scripts, and behaviours, and habits, and flexible plans. You can be micro-ambitious with tiny goals that add up. Goals that are connected and compounding. 

Behavioural Finance looks at the idea of biases. Embodied shortcuts that help (or hinder) us in our decision-making. We don’t (and can’t) have full information, but must act anyway. Understanding your biases can help you tweak your micro-goals. Understanding your biases can help you see what you do for uncommonly long periods of time, rather than getting obsessed over things that come and go, and cancel out.

Give it Time

Time and Energy

Freedom is not the absence of constraints. It is a sense of autonomy and consent. The ability to make decisions. The feeling that you are seen, and matter. All decisions are made inside containers and with consequences. How much do you value time? How much do you value being paid a lot? Many of the ways to make lots of money will consume your time and energy on problems that are not your priority. It's not about you. 

You can get to a situation where weekends and holidays are where you get access to your community. Where your job becomes your weight-of-time-and-energy community, and your life. Be honest about what the life you are designing will really look like. Speak to as many people as possible who are doing what it is you think you want to do. Map it out. See what the barriers and trade-offs are for you. Have honest conversations about the advantages and disadvantages of the paths you are considering. 

As you go through life, there are people at similar stages to you who make different choices. Then a few years later, their stage will no longer be similar. Yet we will only see the conspicuous. Tangible success is easy to share. We are not completely open and authentic about each other’s struggles. Partly because we only have so much emotional capacity. We are dealing with our own stuff. Opening up is a “call to arms”, and so the barriers we put up make a lot of sense. Trusting and allowing each other to deal with our personal struggles, and shout only if necessary.

Source and Use 

of Energy

Bears Repeating

The biggest pushbacks I get on the framework I use for developing financial freedom are:

1) Most people in South Africa can’t even find enough money for a living wage 

(half of all South African wage earners earn less than R3,300 and support 3.5 people), and 

2) “I can’t reduce my expenses”

The first point is heartbreaking and a mountain to climb. The second point is often true however big that income is, and despite the first point. “The lifestyle to which someone has become accustomed” is a phrase that disconnects completely from how that lifestyle is paid for. Even when there are masses of people living on less than you, our spending is often determined by the people who live in the bubble we live in. Bubbles have price tags, which either require someone else to foot the bill, or have real consequences for the available earning choices you have. 

The reality is that there is no one set of steps people need to take. There are trade-offs. There are hard choices. There is honesty required. Financial security and investment is a group sport. If those around you are spending freely, it is going to be difficult to build buffers and capital unless you are earning significantly more than them. 

That hard pill to swallow bears repeating. Half of all South African wage earners support about 3.5 people on less than roughly GBP165 or USD230 a month. 

Less than ZAR940 (GBP50 or USD65) per person per month.

Bears Repeating

See the Value

One of the ways to gain control of your spending is to select where you place value. To find value in the plentiful rather than in the scarce. Spending is often a team sport, and changing your habits can be incredibly difficult. 

Like trying to become more vegetarian in a South African meat-eating culture. It is painless to change habits if the tweak feels better. If it is simple to make vegetarian food, and you enjoy how it tastes, it will be a smoother transition to eating less meat. If you feel like you are punishing yourself and being a martyr because everyone else is eating what you want, and you don’t like what is on your plate, it is going to be incredibly difficult. We get a quota of self-discipline, and if you use it all up in one area, it can explode in another. “Everything in moderation, including moderation”. 

Build changes to behaviour realistically, gradually, and sustainably. Planning is not about epiphanies. Break-through-weekends are followed by Monday alarm clocks and deep soaked patterns. To make real change, see the value in things that you did not before. Tweak your drivers and incentives. Deep, slow, conscious re-programming. The self-imposed limits stop feeling like chains because you experience the world differently. 

“Save more later” is an approach where the goal is not to adjust your spending up if your income goes up, or you get an unexpected boost. Where you snap the sense that life is better if you spend more, and spoil yourself because “you are worth it”. Reward yourself with the abundant. Put your money to work.

Changing Habits

Obstacles and Barriers

Formal studies are not solely about skills and knowledge. We live in a world where that is largely available for free. I heard about email and the internet for the first time as a 14-year-old from my Maths teacher who had visited the United States. Information flow was starting to burst. 

She was also the one who told me about Actuarial Science. Even though the world is connecting, money is still made in containers with barriers. The way we build the structure is partly through formal education. I broke some of my barriers (the country we are born in) after school by going overseas for the first time. I went to the United Kingdom for two gap years, working as a teaching assistant on a work-travel visa. 

When I came back, I picked something with barriers. I knew there were people who paid people who passed these exams. Jobs that wanted these qualifications. Limited people with those qualifications. I looked at the shop. I saw what the expensive products were. I looked at the cost to put those on the shelf. I went and did the thing that was most tolerably difficult (challenging barriers) with the highest gap between price and cost. Based on my existing set of scarce skills and knowledge. 

That is not the same for everyone. Which is why it paid well. Scarcity pays. Understanding money is partly about understanding and overcoming your obstacles and barriers.

Map of Internet Connections

Studying the Box

Even if you can stop yourself bending to the social pressure of keeping up with the Joneses and Khumalos, you still need to eat. You cannot not care about money by ignoring it. If you do not learn to control money, it can control you. Even if you live very simply, the money must come from somewhere. We do not yet have concepts like Universal Basic Income, where the foundations are strong enough to allow everyone the security to look up and forward. 

The challenge is, no two paths are the same. Part of financial planning is deep pragmatism. All advice is autobiographical. We can only see from our perspective. Listen to others, but your choices will come from where you are. My “source of wealth” was based on leaning into the cards I was dealt, and accepting how money was made. 

I spent eight years doing formal studies. One degree and three sets of professional exams. Not out the box thinking at all. I studied the box. Studying risk, investments, and planning. Studying how barriers are built. How decisions are made. How people are empowered. How capital is built. What options are available and how they are seized. I am still studying. 

The heart of planning is being able to learn as the situation changes. To come from where you are. To control your response. To build the privilege to choose what you care about.