DO I BUY OR DO I RENT?

So, you don’t want to pay off someone else’s bond, right? Intuitively this thinking makes sense and it has been the reason for many people wanting to own a property. However, rental expense never goes away, even if you stay in the house you bought. “How can this be?”, you might ask. You first need […]

RUGBY RULES FOR PROTECTING YOUR CAPITAL

Sometimes it helps to start by focusing on what something is not. Leaving your cash under the mattress is one of the surest ways to cause a permanent loss of capital. No, not necessarily due to burglary on your premises, but rather the simple facts of economics. If one works with a long-term average inflation rate […]

MOVING ON SWIFTLY

As February breaks and salaried employees give a collective sigh of relief after a long-awaited January payday, it is worth taking a moment to do a quick recap of 2019 and begin planning for the year ahead. Few would argue that 2019 was a far more tedious year than even 2017 or 2018, at least […]

LAYERS OF INVESTING – Where to begin?

The range of options available to investors can often be overwhelming. Where do you even begin? To answer this question it can be useful to break your investment decisions into three simplified layers: 1. The ‘why layer’ tries to establish exactly what your investment objectives are. It attempts to answer the question as to why […]

INVESTING AGAINST EMOTION

Reason is probably one of the biggest distinctions between humans and animals. It has given us the ability to learn from different circumstances and to adapt over time. These lessons sit deep in our subconscious minds and instinct / emotions /intuition allows us to react quickly without having to reason ourselves out of every situation, […]

NAMIBIA IN RECESSION – HOW WE ENDED HERE

Until now it had never been difficult to answer this question because the words ‘’forward’’, ‘’onward’’ or ‘’upward’’ were mostly used to describe Namibia’s economic growth and outlook. Until now, the measures of progress showed Namibia improving consistently despite the challenges presented by her geography and complicated history. Real per capita income has increased, unemployment […]

CHANGE ON THE HORISON?

In last month’s issue we unpacked the origins of the current economic crisis gripping Namibia. We recounted the combination of external factors and domestic policy errors that contributed to the economy overheating, which has resulted in the depressed climate we find ourselves in. The latest quarterly GDP update (Q2) from the Namibia Statistics Agency (NSA) […]