Making ends meet, neh, Cyril?
That salary increase you usually bank on escaped me last year and a pay-cut for three months made that debt-hole even darker.
President Cyril Ramaphosa. Picture: GCIS
“Everything I want and need comes easily. My abundance is clear for all to see.” This is the PS some psychic sends me after I cancel my booking with him because my salary is fully booked and he is a luxury.
“Chant it for 21 days,” he tells me. It’s day 15 – and how I chant it. But the abundance seems to escape me, maybe because I fall in the category of “one in two South Africans drowning in debt”.
That salary increase you usually bank on escaped me last year and a pay-cut for three months made that debt-hole even darker. Oh, I count my abundant blessings: the roof still over my head, even Eskom’s daily load shedding that last night gave me an excuse to build a bonfire and sip wine with a good friend.
ALSO READ: ‘MPs struggle to make ends meet’: Ramaphosa pleads backbenchers’ case
He’s the two in the one-in-two and doesn’t know debt.
“Business debt, yes. Millions of it,” he tells me, pouring the vintage wine he brought – a welcome change from the doos I normally have to indulge in.
He’s living large and for him cash is king. Unlike me, he won’t compromise on two-ply toilet paper or good coffee and wine, so I promptly get a lecture in financial discipline, which I apparently sorely lack.
“How can you drop your car insurance? What do you mean you’re not on a medical aid?” His disbelief is starting to be annoying.
“Are you buying groceries on budget? Are you mad? Do you know how much that trolley is costing you on credit?”
Yes, I do, but a girl must eat… My eyes glaze over by the time he hits the “you need to save, put money away every month…” What doesn’t he understand in me being a one?
There simply isn’t money “to put away”, silly. It’s the “incidentals” that are the killer: that car battery you didn’t expect to replace yet; that tyre you have to buy because a pothole shredded the already worn one down to the rim.
But, see? Another abundant blessing: the rim, at least, didn’t need to be replaced. I know I’m complaining with a white bread under the arm. Millions sleep cold and hungry; millions can’t even sniff a salary.
But, hell, a couple of extra hundred will be a blessing in abundance…
