There are always bills to pay and money needed for something or another, and few things seem as boring and unnecessary than an emergency fund. While you can enjoy the rewards of spending on, say, a good winter coat, or can see the benefits of saving for something like university for the kids, emergency funds are, by nature, never seen.

Which is why most South Africans don’t have them – and open themselves and their loved ones up to serious hardship and, ultimately, spending a lot more money.

Here’s why you need an emergency fund:

To keep your life goals on track

Most people operate in a space of barely having ‘enough’ or not quite ever having ‘enough’. Granted, we can have a discussion around what ‘enough’ really looks like, but for most of us, the former sentence is the reality.

This means that we can’t afford a major tragedy – even more so if we’re not insured for it – and still keep financing life as if nothing has happened.

An emergency fund can help you avoid having an unforeseen emergency (or multiple emergencies) derail your life. Many of these unforeseen circumstances involve medical or health issues, which are expensive. An emergency fund of three-to-six months of income works well in conjunction with risk cover.

To reduce the impact on your dependents

If you provide an income or lifestyle for others in your family, having an emergency that cripples your finances will impact them too.

This could impact living standards, educational opportunities and their access to care should they need it. Knowing this creates increased stress and extends the time of recovery from an accident or traumatic event. If you’re able to reduce financial stress you can have more energy available for the other healing and recovery that is needed, for you and those who depend on you.

To keep yourself away from truly bad debt

People panic when they have unforeseen urgent circumstances and no safety net cash for them. If they can’t rely on their kids or the problem is bigger than that, debt becomes the only way out of the immediate problem.

Under this pressure, we can get into all kinds of jams. Loan sharks, paying off nothing but interest for decades and surety clauses which mean things like having to give up your house are all real things that happen to real people. Don’t be one of those people.

Misfortunes in life happen, they’re a guarantee – just like the good things in life are. We plan and set aside money for positives like getting married, advancing careers or having children, but we don’t realise that by failing to plan for the unfortunate surprises too, we put those very good things at risk.

If you need help with this, then let’s get in touch – because you never know when your emergency will be.

A well-balanced, diversified portfolio is a joy for all seasons, giving something no matter what various markets or asset classes are doing. An overly concentrated portfolio is the opposite, a ticking time bomb volatile to fluctuations in macroeconomics and other influencers of the share price.

It’s a worry many South African investors don’t know about, yet some of them are probably in danger of just that.

Here are three red-flags that you could be in danger of an overly concentrated portfolio.

When you’re not equal with your equities

Equities has been the favoured asset in South Africa for some time now, thanks to its higher growth next to a gruelling property slump and unforgiving bond conditions. But equities, just like every other asset class, has its bad days, or rather years. In fact, just a few months ago, Moneyweb came out with an article proclaiming that local cash has outperformed local equities for a solid five consecutive years now.

When local isn’t lekker

Then there’s the fact that you might be investing in equities in what you think is a spread-risk, diversified way, but all of it’s in South African companies.

Allan Gray has this to say about the matter:

“South Africa has a relatively small equities market with a handful of dominant shares, spread across a few sectors, which are available to invest in. This presents a significant risk for investors: a highly concentrated portfolio.

“When compared to global markets, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) is relatively small, comprising less than 1% of the total global investing universe. It is also highly concentrated, with the top 10 shares on the FTSE/JSE All Share Index (ALSI) making up between 50% and 60% of the index. In contrast, the top 10 shares in one of the world’s major indices, the S&P 500, make up just over 20% of the index. Most of the ALSI’s concentration comes from one share: technology giant Naspers, which makes up 20% of the index.”

Now, if that’s not putting your eggs in one basket, we don’t know what is. And for those who think to themselves: ‘well Naspers is a great bet, so are the others, so what’s wrong with investing in fewer but better market champions?’

We have one word for you: Steinhoff.

No one, apart from a very few smart people in Sygnia and Melville Douglas, ever saw the writing on the wall. Steinhoff was too big to fail, it was getting such great gains, it was even called that exact word: ‘champion.’ And when it did fail, it took hundreds of thousands of peoples’ hard-earned money with it.

When you’re overweight

No, we’re not talking about your body mass index here. Being overweight in a certain company, like Naspers for example, or even in something that seems a ‘safe bet’ like cash as an asset class. Being overweight in any one thing can jeopardise your wealth creation. A simple example: many people comb over their investment portfolio diligently, checking unit trust gains against the market and diversifying extensively, but when it comes to the retirement annuity their company has invested them into, they never check the weighting at all.

So, how do you do it right?

“Because of that consideration, I normally have a minimum of 10 investments in the portfolio and limit portfolio at risk (PaR) — defined as position size multiplied by the downside to the worst-case intrinsic value estimate — on any one investment to 5 percent at cost and 10 percent at market,” says Gary Mishuris on the CFA Institute website.

It’s a simple, moderate way to do it, but something that’s out of reach for the average investor trying to work it out on their cellphone calculator. This is where a professional financial adviser can help you quickly and easily. No centration required.

Last month we talked about interest rate risk – the risk of your investment devaluing and you losing money due to changes in interest rate. In a sense, this is about an investment’s possibility of flailing due to macroeconomic conditions. This month, we’re going to look at credit risk.

Credit risk is a very different type of risk to interest rate risk, and largely impacts the one extending the credit. It’s the risk that credit (what is owed) is not repaid. So, if a bank loans a business capital, the credit risk would refer to the chance that the business goes into business rescue or another situation in which the bank does not get the interest owed to it on the loan and cannot recoup that loss but must, instead, write it off.

Traditionally, credit risk is defined by risks taken in investing/lending to someone without them paying an upfront sum. These types of risk almost always come with interest charged to the borrower or loan recipient, along with the repayment of the loan amount. In a sense, you could almost say that interest on a loan is the ‘payback’ an institution gets for taking the risk in lending out money – which explains why higher interest rates are charged for higher risk entities. A business in its infancy will pose a higher credit risk compared with one that is more established and proven its financial viability.

What do you need to know about credit risk?

Credit risk in your business – This risk affects you very materially if you have your own business and must deal with clients. Unless you charge upfront or require down payments, you are essentially taking on credit risk every time you do work for a client in the hopes that they will pay you later. For this reason, it’s worth looking into companies’ reliability with honouring debts before going into business with them.

Credit risk as an investor – If you are an investor, credit risk signifies the risk to you that a bond you’ve invested in may default and you’ll have to write off the sum you invested there. This can be a good strategy for investors when the company invested in is on a solid upward trajectory and the economy is too. The higher the risk is, generally, the higher the possible reward, so it’s a potentially dangerous game that really requires the help of professional advice.

Credit risk, just like any other type of risk, is not something to be feared or avoided. Not if you want to create wealth, that is. Rather, like each type of risk, it is to be understood and taken seriously, discussed with a professional before making any serious investments and decisions.

Education around the basics of wealth creation and preservation is like a good, solid diet packed with healthy food staples, it can help you enjoy healthy finances for years and create a strong foundation for building your future.

Bonds are a healthy part of any portfolio or ‘diet’, and most people think they understand them. Today, we want to talk about an aspect of investing in bonds most people misunderstand or simply don’t know about – interest rate risk.

In today’s highly uncertain market, bonds remain an attractive option. Not subject to having the sudden market-related dips (or spokes) that equities do, it’s a lower risk option for preserving or growing your money in most environments.

Sounds great, right? Potentially.

Most bonds pay a fixed rate of interest over a defined period of time.

What many investors don’t understand about bonds is that the rate is set according to prevailing market interest rates at the time of issuing the bond, but the market interest rates that occur afterwards during the period of the bond may not be even remotely similar to the ‘weather conditions’ when you first took out the bond.

What this means for your money is that, should interest rates rise, your bond’s value will lessen. Should interest rates fall, the reverse will happen – your bond is now worth more. Because this is directly related to inflation (interest rates rising are usually due to CPI itself rising above what’s been predicted for it), a good way to understand this is inflation. If inflation increases, even though you have the same notes and coins in your wallet, that money is effectively worth less. If inflation decreases, slowly your money will be worth more in relation to the rest of the market (price of eggs etc.). It is not the notes or rands themselves that have changed if the inflation rises, it’s the market.

This is interest rate risk, and it’s a vital element which affects how much return you’ll get once a bond matures.

It is seldom that we truly know what is going to happen to the market in the next two to three years with absolute certainty, but in the case of interest rate risk, it seems that we do. South Africa will be hiking rates for the foreseeable future, as announced at the end of last year when the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) said it would raise the repurchase rate quite significantly to 6.75% per year as of November 2018.

What does this mean for our bonds? Well, if you look at the above in SA in isolation, it means that a bond’s value will lessen if interest rates rise (which they have) and will continue to do so if interest rates continue to climb (which it looks like they will).

A word of warning – any investment in any form should be underpinned by knowledge. Choosing to put money into a bond of any kind is no exception. Taking interest rate risk by investing in a certain bond without knowing every aspect inside and out is like getting onto a horse and expecting to ride it when you don’t know how a horse moves.

However, if you only ever invest in things you already understand, where will that leave you? Your money may grow, but your own horizons and understanding won’t.

Consider this a call to adventure – not to invest in bonds necessarily, but rather for us to chat about things you don’t fully understand, perhaps interest rate risk being one thing, and start an exciting new chapter in your financial awareness and confidence!

“Never look back unless you are planning to go that way,” Henry David Thoreau once said. Investing in the future is an exciting prospect, but a daunting one as well. And what could be more of a ride than investing in motor vehicles?

But the road can be a bumpy one, even if it is a fast ride, so prudence is paramount when investing in all things motor.

Here are four of the biggest draws for investing in the future of cars:

Electric

According to Allan Gray, Bloomberg forecasts that EV sales will increase from a record of 1.1 million in 2017 to 11 million in 2025 and reach 30 million by 2030. Sounds great, right?

Not so fast – electric vehicles are, like most new technologies, still prohibitively expensive to make and not available to the mass market yet. This means that even if electric cars were to go mainstream, they would be making a loss for investors for some years to come. Except perhaps for Tesla, but that is a big perhaps.

Also, in developing nations like South Africa, the infrastructure just isn’t ready – the Champs-Elysées may have plug points for electric cars, but Jan Smuts and Chapman’s Peak certainly don’t.

Hybrid

This is the other major problem with investing in all things electric – hybrid cars from mainstream motor companies like Jaguar and Mercedes mean far lower fuel emissions comparative to electric cars, yet at a fraction of electric cars’ price.

“…the consumer appeal for electric cars is based on their lower carbon emissions and lower running costs – something that hybrid cars (that are propelled by a petrol or diesel engine with an electric motor) also offer [and] traditional automakers are well placed to compete in this segment,” says Allan Gray’s investment analyst Sibabalwe Kasi.

Self-driving

The most talked-about and Asimov-like motor innovation of the moment is driverless vehicles. It’s arguably one of the more difficult trends to take seriously for those in developing nations who have only ever seen them in Sci-Fi movies, but it could be a real meal ticket for early bird investors if done right.

“The autonomous vehicle (AV) market is going to take years to mature, but a lot of progress is already being made — and investors should start taking notice of its growth now. In 2040, an estimated 33 million driverless vehicles will be sold annually, and Intel and Strategy Analytics predict that self-driving vehicles and their services will create a $7 trillion industry by 2050,” says respected US finance site The Motley Fool.

However, patience is the name of the game here. “While all of these companies have lots of potential in the AV space, it’s going to take years for them to begin seeing sizable contributions to their bottom lines. That doesn’t mean that self-driving cars aren’t coming or that they won’t be transformative when they do; it just means that investors should temper their expectations as this new market unfold,” The Motley Fool concludes.

Car sharing

Another potential avenue for investment isn’t in cars themselves at all, but in the companies behind the ongoing ride sharing revolution. Big name companies like Daimler and BMW are betting on a future in which almost no one in urban spaces will own a car soon – and it’s a compelling gamble.

In an ever more environmentally conscious world with diminishing fossil fuel resources and more strict emission laws, owning your own car may not be normal forever. This is especially true in a future where self-driving cars dominate the roads. If your car could drive itself to you to fetch you from work, why should you pay a larger sum to have that car ‘service’ only you, when you could pay a fraction of the cost and still be picked up whenever you wanted, like your own driverless Uber?

So, which choice is best? It’s up to you, you’re the driver of your own investment, er, vehicles… Just ensure you have an advisor who knows their stuff in the passenger seat.

‘It’s my life, it’s now or never. I ain’t gonna live forever…’ The famous Bon Jovi words could well be used to describe retirement – and saving for it.

Most people don’t know where to start when contemplating something as big and hectic as retiring in decades’ time, but there are ample titbits of conventional wisdom from the financial planning industry. Let’s take a look at some, and their pitfalls.

The most well-known number: 65

The age ‘65’ is the one we all see on the calculation spreadsheets and articles about retirement. Retirement annuity and pension fund products are generally designed to be withdrawn when the individual turns 65. You may well be forgiven for thinking that everyone who retires from work does so the minute they blow out the candles on that 65th cake – but you’d be wrong.

To say ‘I am going to retire at 65 no matter what’ is to overlook and discount the type of work you do, your health and the future of healthcare as we know it. A professional sportsman, for example, may need to retire at just 35, whilst an author could comfortably go on working until 80.

Once you hit 65 years old, you may be having so much fun that you may not want to retire yet, or you may contract a critical illness in your fifties which means you cannot work anymore, a full decade earlier than planned. There’s also the pesky matter of longevity. For years, science and healthcare has advanced and people are living longer and longer lives, yet that stubborn ‘65’ has stayed the same.

All these things are variables that most do not take into account when they insist they will retire at 65 – and we all know that when you fail to factor some of the variables into your calculations, things just don’t add up.

Another number: 75

No, this is not the new, older age to retire at – this, according to the financial planning industry, is the amount of your current final income which you will require at the age of retirement.

It’s hard not to see the problem with this one. A student earning ten thousand a month coming to a financial advisor, for example, may be told they’ll require 75 percent of their normal income in retirement. But that rigid number fails to factor in the fact that that same student will need triple or quadruple his current monthly salary in just 12 years’ time when he’s married, has bought a house and is paying for two kids’ schooling. At that point, the calculation of 75 percent may well be correct, but not always. Either way, it serves as a useful starting point when trying to visualise your future.

The number for right now: 15

Of the few that do save for retirement in South Africa, most save 10 percent or less of their salary towards retirement. Gross salary. If you earn fifty thousand a month, for example, and put away five grand towards retirement each month without fail, you may feel pretty good about yourself A lot of people don’t put away anything, after all. But conventional wisdom states you should save 15 percent of your monthly salary towards retirement.

What is important to note is that you are an individual, with unique life circumstances, and numbers are often just that – numbers. An abstract figure of ‘15 percent’ may not take into account your life situation at all – 15 percent isn’t going to be enough to buy a yacht and retire at 50 unless your monthly salary rivals Bill Gates’. 15 percent may just not be doable for a struggling single parent of four kids who is trying to put food on the table. It’s all relative to your personal situation.

The number for once you’ve retired: 5

Let’s assumed that you don’t want to financially cripple your children by forcing them to take you in once you retire. Let’s assume you want to live reasonably comfortable, independently, for a good twenty years in retirement. The number for you now is five – financial professionals dictate that you will draw five percent of your total amount saved for retirement every year of retirement.

What they fail to mention is that five percent of, say, Jeff Bezos’ retirement savings, will look very different to your total retirement savings.

Also, what about inflation? Inflation has been rising at a steady and relentless rate for the past few years showing no signs of slowing down, yet the average balanced fund in SA has grown just five percent or less over the last five years. If you dutifully save your 15 percent each month, then later only draw five percent of your savings a year and yet CPI has been increasing by six percent year on year, that’s not going to work out that well. Even though you did exactly what the numbers told you to.

There is no real formula

What all the above illustrates is that using abstract generalisations for individuals living real lives just doesn’t work. Numbers like 65, 15 and 75 are a helpful starting point, but are designed to be just a start before you individualise beyond that according to your personal financial needs and future.

The best way to think of the numbers above is to think of them as a minimum, not as a goal. A lot can go wrong even if you do save 15 percent of your income to live off of 75 percent from the age of 65 years.

So start here, but don’t finish with the numbers. They could never define you as a person, so don’t let them define your future.

For those who tell you not to worry so much and just invest in anything, no need to do much research, you need only say one word: Steinhoff.

Steinhoff has been called the largest corporate scandal in SA history, but what many people don’t know is it’s fall was also the largest failure ever on the JSE. The collapse promoted months of headlines, in which South Africans read, shaken, about the demise of the brand which had been every investor’s darling. It wasn’t just the death of a retail titan, it was the death of the concept of ‘too big too sink’ corporates.

In a world post-Steinhoff, all previous bets about how investment works are off. If everyone – and it was pretty much everyone, high and low – was wrong about Jooste and his African champion, couldn’t we be wrong about everything else? It’s not comfortable stuff to ponder, but actually there are valuable lessons in the Steinhoff fallout for investors willing to look.

Lesson 1 – Recommendation is no match for your own research

Many of the most knowledgeable and powerful men and women on the SA investment scene were overweight on Steinhoff. Some, like Christo Wiese and insurance champions Johan van Zyl and Len Konar, were even members of Steinhoff’s board and had decades of investor experience on their sides. This shows the importance of checking out financials for yourself, corporate governance frameworks and growth patterns and projections. If something seems too good to be true, with meteoric out-of-the-ordinary growth from nowhere, then it probably is.

Lesson 2 – Look at management, not results

The common thing to do when considering an investment option is to look at results as a predictor of future dividends, but growth can be misleading. This is especially true of a depressed economic period like the one we’ve had for a while, in which good companies can suffer in their results due to the market, while bad ones’ shortcomings can be masked. Instead, look at the corporate governance of the board and how transparent the company is for a feel. Steinhoff, for example had amazing figures on paper, but their complex two-tier management structure was, in hindsight, a sign of deliberately complicating matters to hide the truth.

Lesson 3 – Not everyone will be a Steinhoff

The reason Steinhoff made the news is that it’s the exception rather than the rule. Although there have been a few corporate governance lapses though none as severe as Steinhoff, it doesn’t mean that our corporate governances metrics themselves are broken. On the contrary, South African governance law and the JSE itself have been proven to be quite robust in the crucible that was Steinhoff. The internationally respected Frankfurt Sock Exchange (FSE) took just as hard a hit as the JSE, after all. The chances are very low that you will invest in an unsound company of the Steinhoff ilk – especially after the scandal meant corporates undergoing extra scrutiny.

And if you’re worried about existing investments of yours? Let’s chat, revisit our due diligence, and remember – Steinhoff happened once, but that doesn’t mean it’ll happen again.