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So Orca suggested a holiday thread, I like that idea, I'll start with a couple of pics from my recent tour de Europe:


We started in London, yes that's about as un-londonish as you can get in a picture, but we picked the hottest week of the year to be there


Next up was Belgium, it was blooming beautiful


On to Germany, as you can see, we only do 5 star accommodation


From Germany we quickly crossed into Austria, where it was us, the bikes and the Danube


Except when we weren't near the Danube, taking the road less travelled


We usually made our way back to the river again though


My wife says this is a dork on a bike. But this dork never burnt his face or neck. Oh yes, we washed clothes every day, so we always had something hanging on the front or back of the bike to dry out.


On one of the days we past by a ferry without noticing. It meant that a 60km day ended up being an 80km a day. Those are tiring!


Melk, probably the highlight of the trip, and we never even knew there was anything to see there until we arrived it was an amazingly good surprise.


Apparently this place had the best dessert my wife has ever tasted. Something like a dumpling soaked in syrup with cooked peach inside. If you're on a biking holiday you have a license to each yummy food.


We cycled up to Vienna, spent a couple of days there and then took a train to Budapest.


The perfect cure for sore muscles is a day spent in the thermal baths 

http://investorchallenge.co.za/the-cheesecake-powered-cash-printing-machine/

http://investorchallenge.co.za/7-financial-products-so-bad-they-should-be-an-april-fools-joke/

 

I'd love to hear from you. I'm not particularly keen to get into trading, but I'm thinking it might be a cost effective way to convert ZAR to USD.

After a bunch of research I've found that I can exchange most major currencies with my interactive brokers brokerage account, for instance I can convert USD to GBP or EUR to USD for 0.01% commission. They allow me to convert to and from ZAR very cheaply too, but don't have a local account so I can't deposit ZAR unfortunately.

I've had a query from a member who wants to remain anonymous, and is looking for some advice. Obviously  we're not financial advisers, but then again many financial advisers put clients needs after their own commission cheques. I offered to post this for the member anonymously and see if we can get some good ideas from the rest of you here.

So here are the facts:

-Female age 60 retiring end March 2016
–Healthy BUT seriously financially challenged!
-It must be kept simple – see previous comment.
-She is unlikely to ever move abroad, holiday in Botswana/Namibia would probably be it.
-R2m is in a pension fund and max withdrawal is 1/3rd balance must be reinvested in an annuity.
-R1m free to invest anywhere. But for emergencies, say R100K should be immediately accessible.
-R375K is in a deferred/preservation annuity at Allan Gray.
-Unless there was a auto facility for selling equity (ie. 2%) to top up income, that would be a non-starter.
-There is no debt to speak of.
-Intention is to put R30K in TSA.

-R1m to be done in next week and a half as we are going away until March and any tax benefits (if any) should be in place before end of tax year.

The member initially wanted to do the following:

I have suggested  moving the R2mil to the Allan Gray fund on retirement. (They surely have to perform better at some stage going forward?) Take out a living annuity and splitting the investment 60/40 Stable and Balanced Funds. If at some stage in the future the performance is not meeting her needs she could convert to a life annuity with a pension, with inflationary increases, for life.

Putting the R1mil from the notice account in some sort of ETF (s) - not sure which? Maybe Property, with an overseas bias, for some sort of Rand hedge and use the income to supplement her pension drawing which I estimate will be around 8.5K per month.

Just to clarify........
-By property I meant one or two of the listed reits, not houses. Preferably “foreign/local” ones where the distribution would be considered a dividend, not interest.
-The idea of a rand hedge was partly to offset imported inflation. Also see previous comment.
-The 4% rule could be applied to her pension withdrawal, I suggested 5% to achieve her income need, assuming 10% plus return.
-My suggestion of a living annuity was because you can convert it to a life annuity at any time, but not the other way round.

So what would you advise this woman to do?

*I'm still missing a few pieces of info, such as living costs, housing situation and medical costs, so if the member would send that to me I'll update it here. Any other info you think would be worthwhile?

I made a ring but never did the write up. It was easy though, so here it is:

1) Buy some wood. I used wood edging without glue from timber city. They sell it by the meter for about R20/m. You can easily make 5 rings out of a meter. The thinner the better. They only had two types without glue when I was there, one dark one light. The dark one worked better, the light one looked better.

Also buy sandpaper, all the different grits right up to 1200 which is pretty smooth. Apparently you can get up to 4000 and auto paint shops, I'd like to try that, but timber city went to 1200 which seemed to do the job.

2) Cut a 20cm strip, wider than you want the ring and then boil the living daylights out of it. Like for 30 minutes or even more. The more you boil, the easier it is to roll. When you think it's about ready, then boil it some more.

3) Take it out and start to roll it. Only as tight as you can without it folding and splintering. Then put an elastic band around it and re-boil it. Then re-roll it tighter. Repeat until it's tight enough.

4) Take the wood out and start applying superglue before it cools. Start on the very inside, glue a centimeter, then roll a centimeter until you've glued and rolled the whole piece. Swear a lot when you glue yourself to the wood, table, your clothes and hair. (If you can find gloves made out of plastic shopping bag material then you're in business, otherwise don't worry, superglue comes off in two days on skin). This is what it looks like now. Pretty isn't it :p

Just a note, superglue goes white if it's wet and doesn't look nice on dark wood, you might want to wait till it's dry before you glue the last layer or two.

5) Now get a sheet of very rough sandpaper. and sand to the thickness you want. I put the paper on the table and rub the sides of the ring until it's about as thin as I'd like.

6) Now you need to get a drill or a dremel out because you're too cheap to buy a proper lathe. I had a dremel so that's what I used. Take a large sanding type bit and grind out the inside till it's the right thickness for your finger. Then sand the inside from roughest sandpaper to smoothest.

7) Then I wrapped the dremel bit in tape until the ring was stuck tight on it. Turned the dremel on, and used the sandpaper in my hand to shape. This makes the sandpaper very hot, so you get burnt a lot. Swearing also helps here. Keep on dremeling using finer and finer sandpaper until it looks really pretty.

The last step is to apply superglue to the outside. You can either just use the bottle tip to spread the glue all around, or drip glue onto paper and very quickly spread the glue. Do the inside and the outside separately otherwise you won't have any way to hold the ring. For the inside it's easy, for the outside I again used the dremel bit I taped up to hold the ring.

9) Hang up the ring on a paperclip or piece of wire to dry.

10) Clean up all the mess you've made. Hint, nail polish remover can take glue off counter tops, your hands, the dog and your ears.

End result in dark wood:


And light wood:


Edit, here's the original thread: http://shareforum.co.za/off-topic/what-i-worked-on-this-weekend/

http://investorchallenge.co.za/only-idiots-still-own-unit-trusts/