Supplement your income

While a varsity student, I used to envy my friends who were some two years before me into graduation. My envy was not driven by them graduating before me but by the fact that they would graduate, get a job, afford nice clothes and buy cars. I however was & would not have been jealous. Little did I know that it was not as cut & dry as I contemplated.

Recently I was talking to my Fiancée [joking or maybe not, you go figure] and asked her to give me some money to buy lunch. "Huh, you just got paid, where is your money", she responded with a chortle.

I am pretty sure there are millions of people who [some on a regular basis] receive a similar or worse than response from spouses or children. And don’t count on a salary raise... oh NO! Remember the “R” word?

The price of fuel is going up, even though food prices have surprisingly gone down [food CPI], Eskom is vehemently coveting a series of 35% increases on electricity tariffs to fund its capacity expansion for each year in the three to come, school fees have gone up. Things do not seem to be getting any better. My aunt [grandmother] complained to me last weekend that this year government did not give free books to children in the rural areas, as they had done in years prior. She had to surrender 80% of her old age grant to finance her children's education.

There probably isn’t much people in my aunt’s life stage can do to remedy the situation. But there almost certainly is something you and me can do to create a much healthier financial situation for ourselves. I still haven’t figured it out myself but have some ideas. Like starting a new business on the side. It needs not be a formal one. You can bake and sell fatkoeks with chicken livers at a varsity campus. Ask your unemployed cousin to run this for you while she looks for formal employment. Not only will you be supplementing your mainstream income but you will also be enriching a soul and contributing to our government’s goal of halving poverty by 2014, through job creation. Or if you love cars, go work [part-time] at a local car repair shop, preferably not a chop shop – for obvious reasons. If you love dogs, start an enterprise of walking them in the evenings. Create a brochure and deliver in your neighbourhood’s house post boxes and make some money while playing with what you love. Or work [part-time] for some 3 or 4 hours in a call centre after your work.

Trust me, this may seem like the pain but it really is short term pain and long term gain.

I’ll let you know what I decide to do in my “supplement my income” venture.

Till again... Best as always