1. Adjust your insurance downwards annually. Get a competitive quote and take it to your current broker and let them match or beat it.
2. On that topic get a broker and don’t use direct insurance services.
3. Ask yourself if you really need the top tier medical aid package. Downscale to a hospital plan and get gap cover, then save your own MSA instead. If you didn’t need the MA to begin with that MSA becomes a nice bonus, if you did then you’ve not lost anything and you can score on cash discount.
4. Don’t pay more for banking fees than you need to, unless you can offset them with rewards programs etc. By example don’t get a Private Banking account because they say you can have one. The bank should be paying you to bank with them not the other way around. Take the lower tier instead where you actually use all the benefits and max out the rewards.
5. Don’t drive if you don’t need to. Have things delivered, more often than not the courier cost js offset by the savings in time and money but more so in not buying what you didn’t need for the lack of browsing in store.
Also ask yourself based on your location and where you need to be if you really need a car at all. We are a household with two adults and two kids and have one car and a motorcycle. A second car would he a humongous waste of money and sit doing nothing half the time, whereas Uber easily fills the necessary on occasion gaps. Pp
6. When you’ve paid it off…don’t go buy another one, but keep pretending that you did. You’ve gotten used to paying R2500 a month for a car, keep doing it and put that money away and use it for vehicle expenses only and in a couple years buy the next car cash.
A 5 year old car with 100,000km is not old. And if you do the above you won’t need to worry about the lack of Motorplan and all the other bullshit they hooked you with.
10 years and 200,000km that’s an old car.
7. If you have a home loan use it to your advantage. Not so true in Covid times maybe but it will settle down again in time, but a home loan is probably the highest “paying” investment through offset interest than any savings account or average market tracking index.
Put that MSA and vehicle expense money and everything else in there and making your own little savings pockets for different goals on a spreadsheet. Every month your house is paid off faster.
8. Don’t use Dynamic debit orders linked to interest rates. Set your debit order amounts statistically as high as you can afford within your budget so whatever you are paying off is done faster and with less cost to you.
9. Get rid of the debt and go cash. Of course I’ll say now you shouldn’t have had the clothing accounts or anything but a vehicle and home loan in the first place, so get those wrapped up double quick. Get rid of the credit cards, you don’t actually need them.
And when you only have a car loan left wrap that up as quickly as you can and keep it that way as per point 6.
10. Define your savings goals. It’s pointless to be making all the effort of saving only to be pissing it all away again.
Goals inform your methods and motivations for savings.
Are they short term or long term? Do you want to retire or reach financial independence early? Do you just want to save for a holiday or a deposit on a house or something in the very near future. Do you just need to survive? All these things alter everything else.
11. Bank your change. FNB does this but I’m sure the others have similar by now where it rounds up your spending and then drops it into a savings account. But you could even do it by hand if you actually deal with cash. Even think there was some third party service offering a similar savings plan.
I started doing this and I think it rounds up to the nearest R5 on any swipe and every month I transfer the R200 odd to a fixed deposit account which is now sitting at R16,867 for literally doing almost nothing and not feeling it in the slightest.
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