What these decisions actually cost, in rands

A client sold a property and the proceeds landed in her cheque account. She knew she should do something with it. She also knew that doing the wrong thing would be worse than doing nothing, so she did nothing.

Eighteen months later, the money was still there.

At roughly 8.5% in an ordinary interest-bearing account, that money would have earned about R63,750 a year. Around R5,300 a month. Over the eighteen months it sat still, close to R95,625 quietly went to nobody.

She hadn't lost money. Nothing had gone wrong. There was no bad investment to regret, no crash, no adviser to blame. That's precisely why it went unnoticed for a year and a half.

What actually changed

The money moved into an account that pays interest. That was the whole intervention. No complexity, no lock-up, no risk she wasn't comfortable with. What she described afterwards wasn't excitement about the return. It was that the low-level nagging about it was gone.

There's a second question that follows this one: once money is earning interest, how much of that interest do you actually keep after tax and inflation? That's a different conversation, and I've written about it in The most expensive kind of safe.

Two people, same salary, same discipline, same R1,000 a month. Both stop at 65. The only difference is that one starts at 30 and the other starts at 40.

The person who started ten years earlier contributed R120,000 more over their lifetime. Twelve thousand rand a year. Roughly a thousand a month, for ten years.

That extra R120,000 turned into an extra R2,469,805.

Why this one is worth sitting with

Most people in their thirties assume they'll catch up later, when there's more money. And there usually is more money later. But there's less time, and time is the ingredient that does the compounding. You cannot buy back a decade at 45, at any contribution level.

This is also why the answer to "I'll start when I can afford more" is almost always no. Starting small now beats starting properly later, and it isn't close.

The single most common thing people say to me is a version of the same sentence: I don't have enough to start. Usually followed by a plan to begin properly once things settle down.

So here is what genuinely not-very-much looks like, left alone.

Over thirty years you would have put in R180,000 of your own money. The other R950,244 was not yours to begin with. It came from leaving the first part alone.

The real obstacle isn't the R500

Almost nobody who says this is short of R500. They're waiting for permission, usually from themselves, and often because someone once told them they didn't have enough to bother. I've met people who were turned away by a bank years ago and never went back.

The client I think of most in this context didn't start with a windfall or a bonus or a promotion. She just stopped waiting.

This one comes from a fiduciary specialist I work with, who winds up estates for a living. Asked what the single biggest problem he sees is, he doesn't say tax, or badly drafted wills, or family disputes. He says liquidity. Estates that look entirely healthy on paper, with no cash in them.

His example was a man who had, by any reasonable measure, done things properly. A valid will. An estate worth around R10 million, held in a house, a share of a business and a share of a family property. And a separate R10 million of life cover, with his wife named as the beneficiary so that it would reach her quickly and without complication. On paper, a finished plan.

When he died, the shock of the news was severe enough that his wife was hospitalised. For a period afterwards, she was not in a position to manage her own affairs.

That is not unusual, and it is not a weakness. It is a human response to the worst news a person can receive. But it had a consequence that nobody had planned for, because nobody had thought to plan for it.

Why the money couldn't help

A policy paid to a named beneficiary goes directly to that person. It does not form part of the estate, which is usually exactly what you want, because it reaches them fast and it isn't eaten by fees. But it also means the executor cannot touch it.

So the estate had bills to settle and no money to settle them with. Executor's remuneration, capped at 3.5% plus VAT of the assets the executor actually administers, which here meant the house and the business interests rather than the policy. The Master's fee. Funeral costs. Transfer and valuation costs on the property. Ordinarily the surviving spouse simply pays those in, from the very money the policy has just handed her, and the estate is wound up.

She could not. Not because she was unwilling, but because for that period she was not legally able to act at all.

What happens next, and why it hurts

When an estate cannot pay its own costs, the executor's remaining option is to sell something. Usually that means the assets the family most wanted to keep: the house, a business interest, a share of a family property. Sold on the estate's timetable rather than the family's, which is rarely the moment you would have chosen.

So a plan that had R10 million behind it still ended with assets being sold to cover a few hundred thousand rand of costs.

None of this lands in the first week. The executor is only paid once the debts have been settled and the estate is distributed, and winding up an estate takes many months. But time on its own does not create cash. When the account is finally drawn, the money still has to come from somewhere, and the only liquid money in the picture was legally out of reach.

The fix is almost embarrassingly small

You work out roughly what the estate will need to settle itself, and you nominate that portion of the cover to the estate, with the balance going to the spouse as before. She still receives the overwhelming majority of it, directly and quickly. The estate simply has enough cash to pay its own way without asking anyone to sign anything on the worst week of their life.

It costs nothing extra. It's a line on a beneficiary nomination form. And it is the difference between a family keeping the house and a family selling it.

Every scenario above this one is about what it costs to do nothing. This one is the other side, and unlike the others it is not an illustration. These are real figures off a real client's statements, with his permission and his name removed.

He started in October 2020, seven months after the crash, when starting felt like the wrong thing to do. He opened two accounts five weeks apart and set up debit orders.

Then, in 2026, his household income dropped sharply and stayed down for most of the year.

He took out R176,000. The money had already earned R158,000. Almost every rand his family needed in the hardest year they have had, the plan had produced before they needed it.

Why he knew which money to touch

His money was never one pile. It was split by what it was for, and each piece was invested according to when it would be needed. Education money in a growth mandate, because his children are years from university. Retirement money in a managed mandate inside a retirement annuity. And a short-term pot in a near-cash mandate, which was never meant to grow into anything.

When the year turned, he was not deciding what to sell under pressure. He opened the short-term pot first, because that is what it was built for. He had put R63,000 into it. He took R60,000 back out.

That pot has R8,000 left in it. On a statement that looks like failure. It is the opposite. An emergency fund that never gets used has not proven anything.

And he reduced rather than stopped

This is the part I would underline. When the money got tight he brought his debit orders down to a level he could sustain, and kept them running every single month through the worst of it.

Stopping is not a pause. Stopping is usually the end, because restarting requires a second decision that most people never get around to making.