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I am a bit unclear about something. He took money that was not his and a court has now ruled that he has to pay it back. Isn't it actually theft? Why is he not being sentenced? 

Quote from: Patrick on March 08, 2016, 04:01:16 pm

Quote from: MoneyChief on March 08, 2016, 03:30:28 pm

Quote from: Patrick on March 08, 2016, 02:27:14 pm

Deciding when to move money out of SA (if at all ever?).

Why would you want to leave South Africa, it is one of the best places on the planet:

Rated on purchasing power, safety, climate, health care, traffic, property prices and pollution Cape Town is:

I also quite like it here, but I'd like to travel too. Regardless of that though, I do think at least some of my money should leave at some point, but hopefully at a far better rate than we're seeing at the moment.

It's all very well say that SA is a great place to live. But when your wife/child says their car is broken down besides the freeway - the emotions that go though you are not the same others would feel in the same situation in other countries.

In the last three months, 2 for school friends fathers have been murdered in JHB - both obviously older guys, both in their homes. Another girls brother got badly beaten in a hi jacking. A lekker place to live UNTIL shit happens.

You have to put stuff into perspective. Yes, crime is very scary. We are human and we are designed to fear crime. How scary is obesity, smoking and driving? Fact is that obesity, smoking and driving is much more dangerous than all the crime in this country.

I don't know if you know this, but around half a million people die in South Africa every single year. This is completely normal and keeps the population stable. The vast majority of these deaths are due to illnesses, accidents and natural causes, not crime.

If the news reflected the actual risks for death, they would have to talk for 99 minutes about obesity, smoking, TB, driving accidents, etc and 1 minute about murders. Unfortunately it is the other way around.

I've seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage—leverage being borrowed money. You really don't need leverage in this world much. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing - Warren Buffett

Quote from: Orca on March 18, 2016, 03:21:20 pm

Your primary residence is not an investment but a lifestyle expense.

Could you explain this to me, because I only agree in the following two cases:
1. You have overextended yourself in the house you bought and you can only afford the minimum bond payment, forcing you to pay it off over 20years.
2. You can afford to put in extra into your homeloan but choose to spend that money on other lifestyle stuff?

As I see it, I tell all young guys (early to mid 20s) to get into a property as young as possible! The caveat being, they have to pay it off within 10years as the interest is the killer. If you are renting, you have nothing to show at the end of your stay in that property, you just paid off someone else's property. At least if you sell your property after 10 years, you should get most of your money back, even if you take the capital appreciation and subtract all the costs (interest, rates, levies etc) and made 0% on the property. This is my experience owning property (bought at 550k) for almost 10 years, paid it off in 5, and sold for 700k. If I rented that property I would have paid exactly the same as if I was paying a homeloan, rates, levies and those expenses.

I am going to try and explain why the house you live in is not an investment (my understanding of why not anyway  ). All investments essentially come down to two things, capital and income. You "invest" the capital in return for a stream of income. You can also reverse the transaction by selling a stream of income for capital (example ABSA pays dividends to people buying ABSA shares). Sometimes at the beginning of an investment you might not get an income yet, but the expectation is that you will at some point in the future get an income from the capital you invested (growth stocks, more risky since you don't know what the income is going to be). The reason the house you live in is not an investment is because you are not getting an income from it (the opposite in fact). You could argue that it saves you from paying rent, but I would counter that what you are actually getting is not income, but "utility". For example if you own a toaster, you get the utility of toasting bread, but no income. Just because it saves you from paying a restaurant to toast bread for you, does not mean you are getting an income from your toaster. I think this is what Orca means when he says owning your own house is a "lifestyle expense".

Another thing to remember is that when you buy a "house", you essentially buy two things: The house(bricks, timber, plastic, etc) and the land the house is built on. The house part is very similar to a toaster. It breaks over time and goes out of fashion and needs to either be refurbished, repaired or replaced completely. This part of the "house" is actually losing money constantly. The land part is what keeps its value on average. Depending on location the land value might grow faster or slower than inflation, but on average it stays in line with inflation over the longer term in a growing economy. If the economy tanks, like in Japan, land value plummet as well.

And finally, I think a lot of confusion comes in because people see that their house doubled in price in 10 years, so they say: Wow, houses are amazing investments! But they forget to subtract all the expenses they had over the 10 years like levies, repairs, upgrades, taxes, interest payments, opportunity cost of not moving to where a higher paying job is, estate agent fees, lawyer fees, stamp duty, etc. Oh, and don't forget about  inflation, R10 now was only R5.60 10 years back.

Anyway, hope this helps. Houses are not magic bullets to wealth, they are just toasters on a bit of dirt  .

Residential property is only one of many asset classes that you can invest in. For most people their personal residence should be all they need to invest in this asset class. Any extra money will do better if spread over other asset classes such as:

Commercial property (REIT ETF),
Stocks - Local,
Stocks - International (Rand hedge),
Stocks - Developed markets,
Stocks - Emerging markets,
Stocks - Small/Mid,
Stocks - Large,
Bonds - Commercial,
Bonds - Government,
etc

When people invest all their money in residential property (personal residence and rental properties) I get worried.

FICA, lack of diversity in investments in this lovely country of ours (No small cap index ETF for example) and saying NO to family members wanting to borrow money from me on a regular basis. I keep on telling them I am not a member of the Barclays group.

I used to dabble in some FX trading. I used a company called FXCM. My background is in electronic engineering, so the one day I did a fourier transform on the currency pair and out came white noise. Basically that means that the input data was random random. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense, since when and how much currency is traded is random. There is no way of knowing when some random person somewhere on the planet is going to buy some random amount of Rands. Then I started reading up on this which led me to the random walk theory. When you plot currencies it LOOKS like it has a pattern, but in reality there is no pattern, it is just a random walk (check it out on Wikipedia).

It is always funny to me when people use "technical analysis" and draw lines on the charts to show support and momentum, etc. It is all just an illusion unfortunately.

As for trading actual currency, I use to use the services of 1st contact. Much better rates than the banks.

Why is the ZAR strengthening on a daily basis? Is it not pricing in the budget speech? Gordhan is not a fool that will bow to the ANC's big wigs.

The rand is an emerging market currency and tracks the strength of other emerging market currencies. If you plot for example the Brazilian real VS USD and ZAR vs USD the plots look almost exactly the same.

People get depressed when the rand "weakens" and blame the government, but in reality the Rand is just moving in tandem with other emerging market currencies which are influenced by global trends.