Alabert Einstein, “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.” Truer words … he knew the odd thing about maths I’d say!
When members of the Tripartite Alliance voted the ANC into power, they never anticipated that their assets, salaries, and savings would become the target of the socialist redistributive developmental state.
These myopic socialists and communists all believe that “other people”, the “capitalists”, will be financing their philanthropic redistributive policies. They thought that they would benefit from the process.
Now, after 30 years of redistribution, they realize that it is their livelihoods, municipal services, the purchasing power of their salaries, and the value of their pension funds that have been redistributed as social grants, BEE schemes, politicians’ salaries, and corruption.
All of a sudden the false philanthropists are not feeling so philanthropic anymore.
In over some 3 score years and ten , I have and never will buy a car on credit .
You drive what you can afford to buy for CASH .
If its a skidonk , so be it , but impressing the neighbours in some fancy credit financed Vehicle is frankly extremely unimpreesive !
I hope there is a follow up article on Mr Thunstrom at TFG. The end of the article alludes to it, but I think he has been paid even more than Mr Mark for worse performance.
Another one of “those” executives, the number of stories I read of a similar nature on Moneyweb is atrocious, I might not be a finance/investment guru in any shape or form but if you are measured on the performance of the share price and use excess funds to buy back shares, reducing supply and increasing price (artificially) and then dividing the HEPS of a smaller number of shares to boost that as well, and then ticking all your KPI’s, surely the institutional investors can see through this rubbish. And I still can’t believe share buy backs are not given the roasting they deserve, correct me if I am wrong but a very simple explanation of a share buyback is this, “here mr investor, we don’t want your money cause we dont know what to do with it, so please give us our share back and you can have you money back” that is what a share buyback appears to be in my simple understanding, love to hear a counter argument to this?
first we need 300 bpts rate cuts!!!
Completely agree, in most instances, access to the savings pot may be the difference between losing your car, your house, and going into debt review and having an impaired credit record and losing the ability to ever get out of the black hole of debt. Most South Africans have been under immense pressure, salaries rising at a rate that is well below inflation, costs of load shedding, food price hikes, school fees etc. There is a real need for assistance which is not coming from the stat, the banks etc. BUT Financial Advisors who have been and still are living under a rock cannot see the impact the financial crises has had on families, what is the point of taking about retirement when they cannot even put food on the table now. Get off your Soap Box and go take a walk in the real world.
What amazes me is that the Hilux, Ranger and D-Max stay in the top 5 new vehicle sales every month and you literally see it on our roads. The economy can’t be that bad if there are ample people with either enough money or credibility to buy R1 million bakkies. I wonder how many people are complaining and pleading poverty? but you will think differently if you see their salaries.
Nuclear holds enormous promise.
They have been promising and promising and promising to solve energy challenges for decades.
Thank goodness for a platform like X. We have been lied to for so long by the mainstream legacy media who push their own agendas and cancel anyone who does not agree with their narrative. These days any party that is centrist or right of centrist is branded as extreme right-wing and a threat to democracy. They seldom publish the moral and social decay happening all over the world that has resulted from the policies that they advocate.
Compared with the rest of the the clothing retail segment the performance of Truworhs with Mr. Mark at the helm more than warrants his remuneration and benefits.
Those who understand compound interest benefit from it.
Those who don’t pay for it.
Let me tell you about this government.
They came up with this idea of 2 pot.
On 1 Sept gov empl pension fund (gepf) website was not updated nor their app. They said nothing. Not a notice or an email to workers. on 2 sep their website was updated to a notice saying that the site and app will be down 31 Aug and 1 sep but it was already the 2nd?!?! On the 3rd Sept the app only was updated for certain phones (few Android phones only) and everyone else will have to wait till the 26th September for mobile and web applications. This is the situation with government employees. Oh and they say it will take up to 60days to pay out. An emergency fund that takes 60 days to pay? 30% tax? Lose out of up to hundreds of thousands? Lose months on your service? All for a 20k.
Long term contracts for consumables like these should not be allowed. Disgusting!
Two years ago I was reviewing previous geometry papers with gr 10 learners (as they are now called). The first question was about the floor plan of a simple house. They had to calculate perimeter, area etc. Pretty basic I thought and really very simple for gr 10.
The first question on the floor plan: how many rooms in the house? Grade 10. Could not get over it. True story.
All this fancy technology and bravodo, and yet the taxi industry is dodging tax worth billions everyday in broad daylight. A simple threat to the assessor’s life does the trick and it simply means that the rest of us has to pay more.
Efficient AI, you say? I, a pensioner, was slapped last year with an extra R 750 000 “undeclared rental income”, R 250 000 tax + R 15000 penalties on this “underdeclariation.” My husband and I had lived in primary home A, no tenants, sold and moved to home B, where we lived alone, new primary residence. When they had to concede this was rubbish, I had to explain my “non declaration of rent” on every single property they could find I have ever owned and sold in the past 40 years, mosty unbuilt erven. Efficiency, idiocy or malice? They had to concede it was all fiction and dropped the case. But guess what, on this year’s assessment they still demand the R 15 000 penalty generated on this wholly fictional “underdeclared income”. SARS is still a mess, now only with added malice towards the honest people already paying taxes. They shy away from the shiny shoes and the Breitling watches and cash under the mattress.
Angie Motshekga. SADTU.
period.
Not to mention the tabacco and illegal cigarette industry which would be a breeze to tackle for taxes however the problem is that you first need to want to. This elusive trait is sorely lacking for fear of exposing the elite.
Yes, it is. Just go into politics.
Eat at home.
The food is better and much cheaper.
So is the wine.
I am going to stir the hornets nest here: the one thing that separates bad and well-run municipalities in this country is simple: the DA. Inasmuch as we try to circumvent this factor and try to load a host of all other points, it still comes back to one thing: ANC versus DA run municipalities. All ANC Municipalities are dungeons of corruption, destruction, decay, mess, and downright incompetence. By the way I used to vote for them. Argue alone but while you do go figure!
… and do not forget the preaching profession……
This is good. It means that SAICA still demands a level of competency, which will produce CA’s who can actually do the job… which is what they must do. So the problem clearly doesn’t lie with SAICA in this case. It also doesn’t lie with auditing firms who doesn’t assist their charges enough. For the real cause you’ll have to go down to the bottom of this problem, where you’ll find decades of idiotic policies and attitudes. Think along the lines of freedom before education, the subsequent dropping of standards in schools, the detrimental way in which BEE and AA was implemented and you’ll be on the right track. That is how we got into a situation where you have people with an honours degree, who can’t pass SAICA. The bad news is that there is no quick fix for this problem. After all, how do you undo decades of insufficient education? How do you change an attitude towards education (which is to get a qualification, rather than to actually improve your knowledge and competency) that frankly stinks? How do you undo the detrimental effect our brand of BEE and AA had on the willingness of people to put in the effort it takes to get an education, to run a country, a business, or a municipality? So, more handholding won’t do. We’ll have to do this the hard way, or we’ll just be sticking a plaster on cancer.
Natural law determines that cognitive inequality = material inequality.
Is nature a racist, elitist, unfair, prejudiced, and privileged colonialist, or is nature just nature?
My daughter suffered illness in high school. Despite paying astronomical private school fees, she needed help with maths to gain university entry. What a battle. In the end she was brilliantly helped by a Zimbabwean refugee who started working as a janitor in a college for matric repeats.
It seems some private schools are very business driven to the extent that they push students into maths literacy in case their pass averages are affected. The school governance in this case was not transparent as the business is privately owned.
She has two years left before finishing her medical degree. What a journey.
Oh my.
I dare say — Perhaps they were a bit miffed by a certain BEE appointment ne!!!!!!!!!!
No sane person can expect someone to select the most efficient political economic system if that person is incapable of understanding why C minus B must equal A if A+B=C.
People without a basic understanding of algebra can’t connect the dots in a system where results and performance seem to be randomly distributed. Ninety-nine percent of municipal voters, councilors, and employees in ANC municipalities don’t have this capability. Therefore, any form of performance improvement is simply impossible.
Of all the people on earth, Einstein is the one who said “Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
“Common sense is not so common.” – Voltaire
So what is new?
Even before 1994 the pass rate hovered between 50% and 40%
It boils down to this, everybody wants to be a CASA but not everybody can become a CASA.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, The Rand Afrikaans University had a very strict pass rate for the CTA exam and if the candidates were not 90%percenters, they failed. that is how RAU maintained a near 100% pass rate at Board level.
What did failures do? They enrolled at Unisa and promptly passed the board pushing up Unisa’s pass rate. I write from experience – Unisa is my Alma Mater, and if it had not been for the late Charles Hattingh, who sorted out Unisa’s deficiencies, Unisa’s final Board results would have been abysmal.
NOTHING HAS CHANGED except that some people cannot accept failure. Maths has little to do with it, you only need to obtain a pass in Matric.
You only need a certain level of maths and knowledge of financial formulas that fits into an A4 sheet of paper plus some algebra. No need to know Calculus and other advanced stuff, at the most knowledge of simultaneous equations is required.
It has all to do with the ability to be analytical, intimate knowledge of the subject matter and how to apply it.
14% indicates to me that the aspiring candidates have no clue how to answer integrated questions, which is what the June exam is all about, or that they have not been exposed correctly to the subject matter, or, inadequate exam preparation which most likely it is.
If they didn’t pass probably they were not meant to. Anyway, there are not enough positions going for that many CASAs.
And every year this will be repeated.
You can cancel at any time.
Isn’t Parks Tau the gent who broke Joburg?