At the end of last year, after seven years of building Foundation Family Wealth, I was exhausted. I felt that 2019 had to be a year of rejuvenation.  I wanted to learn new skills, expose myself to new ideas and renew my life and business vision. I also wanted to take some time off.    We ...

If you cannot stomach the loss or simply cannot afford the thing you want to do next because you bargained on obtaining the higher price, you must wait; but you may have to make peace with the fact that you will wait a long time. Or forever.

As an adviser, I am frequently asked about the investment merits of lifestyle assets such as holiday homes, art, yachts or vintage cars. In South Africa, holiday homes are popular and a signal for some, of status and wealth. I married into a family with a holiday cottage at the coast and have been going there for thirty years. That ...

That’s the ratio of people living below the national poverty line of R992 per month in South Africa. That’s 30-million people. I knew that it was bad. But that number hit me between the eyes again. These are the homeless and the unemployed. It excludes our domestic Mercy who worked 6 days a week at the local ...

Where I grew up in the Karoo everything was scarce. Water was always scarce. If the wind didn’t blow, we couldn’t even get water from the boreholes. I learnt to bath in a few centimetres of water only when the water tank was full. I learnt to keep the dishwater standing just in case ...

I have repeatedly seen how the angst literally dissolves away from clients when we show them the concrete steps they can take to make a comfortable retirement a possibility or better yet, that their retirement capital is already enough. By focusing on what they can control, instead of a distant disaster, they can control their ...

Last year when I mentioned in a speech that the world has never had it so good, people asked me afterwards whether I was trying to be funny. I don’t do funny well. My family are forever telling me that I should lighten up. The thing is, compared to the rest of history – the average ...

The year is speeding ahead. We pile on the busyness as our annual holidays become distant memories. But where does this busyness get us? What exactly are we trying to achieve? Are we trying to earn more money so that we can be happier? Add more achievements to our CVs? Boost our egos with a ...

“Small choices are the difference between health and sickness, loneliness or friendship, financial freedom or distress.”

As a wealth strategist, the space I occupy is a junction between the hard currency of how money structures clients’ lives and the softer side of listening to clients’ dreams, goals, concerns and hopes for their lives. I have many observations about this space. One of the most notable being how the contact point between money ...

2018 was a difficult year, one of the most difficult of my career. An overriding pessimism enveloped us: Trump was fighting with China over trade, Brexit turned out to a big mess, Europe stood, once again, on the precipice of a recession, the currency declined, South Africans learnt more about the extent of our leader’s corruption and financial markets tanked. ...