Tighten the belts! Batten down the hatches! Scream! Kick! Go mad! Seemingly everywhere you look, the cost of living is rocketing. Interest rate hikes, higher food prices and yup, petrol is jumping yet again next week (the consolation here is of course that while petrol is going up 18-24c, all the people who bought awful, rattley diesel engines that spew out black clouds all the time are going to pay an extra 27-34c. Ha ha).
I checked out www.shell.co.za and saw how the cost of petrol is broken down. Do you know that on a litre of Petrol 95 (Which will cost just under R9 in Gauteng) you are only paying around R5,50 to the actual cost of the liquid. The rest goes towards the Petroleum Pipelines Levy, Inland Demand Levy, RAF Levy, EQF Levy, Customs and Excise Duty, State Levy, Fuel Levy, IP Tracer Levy, Zone Differential in Gauteng, Dealers Margin, Wholesale Margin and Service Cost Recoveries. Now I don’t know what all of those are but it sure seems that a lot of people are getting rich every time I turn on my car.
Of course we buy that petrol with money that has already been taxed anywhere up to 40%.
So get this; you fill up your tank with taxed petrol, pay with taxed money and drive down the toll road (which is taxed) to a shopping centre. You go in and purchase (with taxed money of course) an illegally price-hiked loaf of bread which of course has VAT on it. You come out and get in your car and have to pay a guy (with your taxed money) for looking after your car. Taxing, right?
Now I wouldn’t mind paying tax if I thought it was doing me good, but the problem is that my tax doesn’t seem to buy me much. So I have to use my own money to pay for things my tax should be buying me. Things like security. I don’t feel safe in my house so I pay for a security company. Health care? Government hospitals aren’t up to scratch so of course I pay for Medical Aid so I can get private care. Education? Well who wants to send their kids to public school? If they aren’t using my taxes for stuff that helps me, what the hell are they using it for? Potholes? Houses? Uplifting the poor? Sure doesn’t seem like it. Oh yeah there was that time when my tax helped pay for Zuma’s legal fees. Now I feel better.
So maybe we should start thinking about additional ways of making our money. Something else on the side to keep the cashflow healthy and us smiling. What is it? I don’t know, but I reckon you should choose something that interests you, something you can have some fun with. New endeavours tend to feed other projects and grow and build organically. Creativity breeds further creativity. And if you are enjoying it, you will try your damnedest to make it work. We live in an exciting country with tons of opportunity – despite all our problems. Hell, maybe we have so much opportunity because of our problems. I mean, how many millionaires must have been made in the last 6 months on the back of generator and UPS sales? So start scheming because things ain’t getting any easier financially. They could, however, get a helluva lot more exciting.
Today a friend told me ‘Find the fun and money will follow’ and I think that that’s a pretty good way of looking at it. So now I’m on a mission: Find more fun. Make more money. And then of course get taxed even more.
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