New year, new goals | Scams | Buying cars

Happy new year, I really hope 2021 is a blessed and healthy year for you and your family.

Financial goals are always high on the new year list of goals, but they are also some of the first things people ditch and forget about.

Firstly I think everyone should have financial goals, even if they are small. Without a goal, you are just drifting through life without any real purpose.

Easy ways to make goals a reality:

Write them down, write them out often.
Look at them daily and refine them as time goes.
Break it down into micro-goals, daily, weekly, monthly, and then annually. This will make it easier to reach.
Implement a system that forces you to pay attention to it (HabitBox is a great app).
Put reminders in your calendar/diary

Scams

Another thing I see people do is having these insane goals like saving R1million while they haven’t ever saved R500, thus make it more attainable. Some things that can be easy goals:

Set up a budget and look at it often and stick to it.
Pay of your smallest debt.
Save R15 000 for an emergency (R1 250pm).

With Covid putting financial pressure on most households, many scams go around, which promises easy money and high returns. Some recent scams include Mirror Trading Internation (MTI) and Crowd1.

So how to spot a scam/pyramid/Ponzi scheme:

Promised returns are unreasonably high with claims like “30% returns each month guaranteed”.
You need to recruit other people to join to get paid.
No product or service is being sold, just a call to recruit people.
There are no call centres or actual people to talk to who works for the company.

Scams

I bought a new car and here’s how I did it