Swart Donkey

Building things of value takes time. There is no magic wand to wave to solve financial problems without a massive stroke of luck. Great prac...

Arya would be a good patron saint of financial stability. Not just because she started small in the eye of a storm, completely alone. Not ju...

My path to financial security involved very little out the box thinking. The cold hard reality of London visits while I was working as a G...

Financial Security is a team sport. The former Mayor of South-Central Durban, Theresa Mthembu, invited me to her home in 1996. It was the ...

Too many of our financial decisions are made based on a multiple, or percentage, of income from labour. Labour Income is a fragile, isolat...

Hand-to-mouth living stumbles when the hands get cuffed. The mouth stays hungry. The most widely accepted form of Engine building is Pensi...

I enjoy the “Humans of New York” series. Little stories about real people. The stories we hear tend to be about outliers. People blessed w...

The gaping hole in my thinking about Financial Security is that most people can’t do what I did. They don’t have the privileges I had. Tha...

I started my career at a tumultuous time for advice givers. I explicitly didn’t (and don’t) give advice, but I gave technical support to t...

The danger of elevating and separating thinking and work lies where we become disembodied. As Ken Robinson warns, when you start treating ...

A Universal Basic Income is a periodic cash payment without means-testing or work requirement, paid to everyone in a community without con...

Building Financial Security starts with a source of income. That requires skills, knowledge, and something as obvious as a punch in the fa...

Debt is the dark underworld of Engines that empower financial freedom. The Stranger Things of the idea that money can work for you rather ...

Most of our money thinking is focused on the “profit line” – earnings and returns. Yet despite the wide range of incomes people get, the v...

I don’t believe in Get Rich Quick schemes. If an idea is too easy, then several red flags come up. Is it wealth creation, or wealth extrac...

Conspicuous Consumption is spending money on luxuries in order to signal economic power. It is meant to provoke the envy of other people a...

There is a bitter irony in the tying of the means of production to labour, and the responsibility for looking after the worker to the empl...

When children think milk comes from the shop rather than the farm, perhaps we have taken abstraction a little too far. The same is true of...

All advice is autobiographical. As we stumble through the madness, we learn lessons. These can feel like dramatic insights we evangelically...

There are good ideas, and there are good business ideas. Some are both, some are one, and some are neither. The more you accept what it tak...