FKC Wealth

02/09/2026

South Africa sits in the World Bank's upper-middle income tier: $4,636 to $14,375 of national income per person per year. 🌍

Look closely at that and you'll notice something. The tier isn't measured in rands. It's measured in dollars. 💵

Which means a country can work harder, grow its economy and earn more in local currency — and still slide down the table if its currency weakens against the dollar. 📉

It's the same arithmetic that plays out in a household. Your salary is in rands. But your car parts, your medical equipment, your fuel, your child's overseas studies and half of what fills your trolley are priced with a dollar somewhere in the chain. 🛒

Growing your rands is not the same thing as growing your buying power. 🤔

30/08/2026

Sunday read. ☕

Budgets are easy. People are not.

Mark Crothers writes about a friend who lost fifteen months of work and still wouldn't cut his gym membership. On a spreadsheet it was the obvious saving. 📊 In his life it was his mornings, his exercise and nearly all his company.

Every home has one of those. The thing a stranger would delete in a second, and you'd give up almost anything else to keep. ❤️

That's why we ask what the money is for before we talk about what it costs.

https://humbledollar.com/forum/one-persons-luxury-anothers-necessity/

26/08/2026

"The market got 12. You got 11."

Beating the market was never the point.

Funded goals. Income that lasts. Mistakes avoided. A life lived well.

That's the scoreboard we keep.

23/08/2026

Sunday read. ☕

Thirteen cards from one suit can be dealt in over six billion different orders. 🃏

That's a closed system with fixed rules and known outcomes — and it's already unpredictable. 🔒

Markets are open, adaptive, and reacting to themselves in real time. 🌪️

So the next time someone tells you confidently where the market will be in twelve months, remember they're playing a much harder game than the card one. And nobody can win that one either. 🔮

I have a question for you. If you take all of the hearts from a standard deck of 52 playing cards, and then lay them out one by one, in how many different orders can the 13 cards be dealt? For exam…

19/08/2026

We get asked this often: "How did my investments do last month?" 📆

It's a fair question. It's just not the important one.

July 2026 was quiet. SA equities +1.2%. US equities -0.1%. Global equities +0.2%. Read those numbers and you'd think nothing happened at all.

Now look at thirty years. SA equities returned 13.7% a year. US equities 10.0%. Global equities 8.4%.

Same markets. Different lens. 🔎

The benchmark that actually matters isn't last month's return. It's whether you're on track for the goals you set — and whether your money will still be there for as long as you need it.

One month can't tell you that. Thirty years of staying invested can.

That's where our conversation starts.

17/08/2026

Most people think the risk is losing money in the market. 📉

The quieter risk is the one on the red line. 🔴

Since 2006, inflation has turned R1 into R2.96 — meaning money that didn't grow lost almost two thirds of what it could buy. No crash, no headline, no bad news day. Just prices creeping up while cash sat still. 🐌

The share market turned that same R1 into R5.33. 📈

Staying out of the market feels safe. Over twenty years, it isn't. ⏳

16/08/2026

Sunday read. ☕

Julia Galef makes a distinction worth carrying into Monday: the soldier mindset asks "can I believe this?" 🛡️ The scout mindset asks "is this true?" 🧭

One is defending territory. The other is drawing a map. 🗺️

Her point isn't that scouts are smarter. It's that they feel differently about being wrong — for a scout, changing your mind is finding out something useful, not losing an argument. 💡

Fifteen minutes well spent, and it has almost nothing to do with money. Which is probably why it's so relevant to it. ⏱️

Perspective is everything, especially when it comes to examining yo...

09/08/2026

Happy Women's Day. 🌸

To every woman holding it all together — the budgets, the school runs, the big decisions and the small ones nobody notices. Your strength shows up in a hundred quiet ways.

Today we celebrate you.

03/08/2026

We're deep into winter — heaters on, days finishing just after lunch. The middle of the year is a natural place to pause. 🍂
So here's your gentle nudge: take a moment this week to look up from the day-to-day. Not to worry about the markets or the headlines, but just to ask the simple question — am I still heading where I want to go?
Halfway through the year is the perfect time to check the map. Not to change everything. Just to make sure the path still fits the life you're building. 🧡
A quiet pause is often worth more than a busy week.

02/08/2026

☕ Sunday Ready Read

"Life was better ten years ago."

Most of us have said it, or heard it, over coffee. And here's the gentle reminder we came across this week: replaying that question is one of the most expensive things you can do with your energy.

Our minds remember the past as rosier than it was, and notice bad news over good — so the present almost always feels like it's losing. That's not reality. That's just how the brain works.

The past is fixed. You can learn from it, but you can't live in it. 🧡

Build something. Help someone. Focus on what's yours to control — the rest is noise.

https://dariusforoux.com/is-life-worse-today-compared-to-10-years-ago/