#SliceOfGasant columnist Gasant Abarder is living precariously from one pay cheque to the next and each payday striving to find ways to make ends meet. South Africans are at their wit’s end with rising food costs, fuel hikes and interest rate increases and there seems to be no end in sight.
I have a very simple relationship with money: it represents a means to an end to live life and not to accumulate obscene wealth. But lately, I’ve had my mind on my money and my money on my mind. People used to discuss their problems over coffee and a cigarette. Now the cost of coffee and a cigarette are their problems.
I earn a decent salary as a media and communication professional with more than 20 years of experience in mainstream media and half of that in editorial leadership positions. But I’m increasingly finding my salary depleted before I’m even halfway through the month.
Don’t get me wrong. We budget very frugally as a family, to the extent that all we need is covered: Food, electricity, municipal accounts and all the grudge purchases that insurance and medical aid represent.
But there is literally no wiggle room. A school blazer is torn or getting too small? That will have to wait. No room for emergency funds or even an insurance excess when there is a fender bender. I clench my fingers and toes when I’m in the queue at the pharmacy in the hope I still have medical aid savings at this early stage of the year.
Just this weekend, I painted a part of our house myself to save some bucks but there was more paint on the floor than on the walls.
And savings? Who has that luxury? Conventional wisdom tells us that we need to put away a reasonable portion for a rainy day. But the rainy days are here while a watery winter sun is shining brightly. It’s not like I haven’t tried for the last three months and have, in fact, accumulated some savings. But life happened and dololo savings remain.
At the cash points for the monthly grocery shop, the amount exceeds what is budgeted for and I do a little nervous dance, wishing for the Checkers Extreme Savings card to do the things for me. So far, the discounts have dipped below the budgetary threshold for groceries. But for how long?
I draw money from ATMs so infrequently that I battle to remember my PIN.
Those grudge purchases are a lot. The medical aid for my family has increased by R1 000 per month this year. I’ve had to cut my cellphone spend and have opted for a sim card-only contract with no upgrade. Here’s hoping my two-year-old phone stays intact with a bit of tape and some luck. Life insurance has been cut to the bare minimum of a death benefit and nothing to put away for the day I retire. The overriding sentiment is that I’m being screwed and there’s nothing I can do.
The selling of thrifted goods I don’t really want to part with, like my prized football kit collection, is a godsend. It helps get me through the month. The car roof luggage box and roof racks I worked so hard to get are already on Facebook Marketplace and I’m also flogging my Beats headphones, which I was elated to buy a few months ago as a treat to myself.
I take my hat off to all the people who have a second job and sometimes even third jobs to make ends meet – the moms and pops industries – working weekends and after hours to provide for their families. In my faith, working hard and supporting your family is a form of worship. May the Almighty bless their efforts.
One wonders what the plan is for ordinary South Africans who are tightening their belts so hard you can hear the collective sound of buckles breaking. There have been zero respites with fuel and food prices and no end to interest rate hikes to make life a bit easier because inflation needs to be controlled, which is already sky-high.
The reality for the workforce – the few we have in South Africa – is that salaries remain static; in extreme cases, people are being retrenched and some even have their salaries cut while the price of basics like bread and milk are unaffordable.
Social welfare grants and payments have to be spread thin across the rest of the population who can’t get work or who can’t work and the amounts paid out are massive collectively but tiny individually.
I wish we could live in the somewhat socialist utopia my 11-year-old daughter imagines for our country, where the wealth is shared among all. But then that is a pipe dream in a land where the price of coffee and cigarettes are our problem.
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