Is R100k/month enough?

It's a question I've been contemplating lately: Given the potential to earn potentially unlimited income, how much is "enough"? I feel like having a solid, ready answer to this (at least, for yourself) is a worthwhile exercise.

For one thing: every human being alive has, at some level or another, a maximum earning potential. No single person can ever earn "infinite money", and it's not really clear what that would even look like in theory. In practice, money is a technology we invented so we could exchange value over great distances, and in the last few decades, has become a very complex tool (for the people who's job it is to keep economies running).

But for your regular, day-to-day, bucket list of things you want to achieve, worries you have about looking after your family, target lifestyle that fits your personality and ambitions, knowing that you have no idea how long you're gonna live - how much is enough?

That's a question I've been asking myself a lot lately, mostly because of the other currency we never seem to have enough of: Time.

How much money do you need, and how much time are you willing to allocate towards achieving it? I think if I had answers to these questions earlier in my life, I'd have made some very different decisions.

The best place that I've found to start tackling this question is in a completely unrelated area: What's your dream lifestyle?

Your Dream Lifestyle

So here's my pitch: You've only got one life. Worse, you don't know exactly how long it'll be, or all the things that will be heading your way (though you can steer yourself towards things you want). What does that life look like?

When I was a lot younger, I thought that travelling all around the world was one of the pinnacles of success. How interesting these lives must be, seeing all these different countries on a regular basis, doing important work everywhere you go.

I then did that for a bit. In the span of about 5 years, I found myself spending time in:

• Salt Lake City, UT
• Phoenix, AZ
• Dallas Fort Worth, TX
• Chicago, IL
• Sao Paulo, BR
• Buenos Aires, AR
• Manchester, UK
• London, UK
• Istanbul, TR
• Windhoek, NA
• Cape Town, ZA (where I live!)
• Johannesburg, ZA
• Singapore
• Perth, AU
• Melbourne, AU

I got a decent slice of a few different countries thanks to my work, and got to see a bit of what it's like to travel so frequently to so many different destinations. Surprisingly (to me), I ended up hating it.

The other surprising thing, after seeing a few different places, was how homogeneous everything tended to be. Granted, there's interesting food, cultural norms, and other differences worth exploring, but for the most part, everyone's kinda just getting on with life as best they can, regardless of where you go.

I did all of that travelling with another ulterior motive in mind: Scouting out places to emigrate to. I firmly believed, growing up as I did, that emigration out of South Africa was a given. That "this country is falling apart" and "there's no future here" - common topics of conversation in my family.

Thing is, I never really saw anything that was an immediate, clear pull factor for leaving South Africa. I'm telling you all of this as my lived experience of trying to determine what I want my dream lifestyle to be, and it taking me about 10+ years to finally start coming around to an answer that I never would have imagined as a child.

I wonder how many people are still chasing those sorts of infantile dreams.

So I eventually decided that my life would ideally, look a lot more "mundane": At some point I'll buy a house in a nice neighbourhood, financial viability be damned. At some point, I'd be able to work on the things I wanted more often than working on things I didn't want to work on, and ideally, have the ability to just arbitrarily take days off when I'm not in the mood. Travel, sure: There's stuff I'd like to re-do as a tourist (and with my family!), knowing that I'm under no pressure and can take my time to explore.

And with that, I was able to start putting some numbers to things:

• Looking at local house prices, and what a "nice" (to me) house goes for
• What my typical monthly expenses are, based on me just buying the stuff I want and tracking the spend.
• How much I'd need to save to have 1, 3, 6 and 12 months of expenses in the bank
• How much I'd need to save every month to increase my odds of decent passive cashflow as I age towards "retirement" (seeing as nothing in this world is guaranteed)
• How much an average 2-4 week trip costs to one of the destinations I have in mind, including flights, accommodation, etc.

Suddenly, my "dream lifestyle" had a very concrete price tag attached. A number I could look at on a spreadsheet, and have my next realization: "Holy shit, I think I can actually achieve this."

Achieving It

Achieving a dream lifestyle is very likely to be your whole life's work, and I think you should be prepared for that. It's not behind the next online course you buy, or the next mastermind group you join, or the next YouTube video you watch on making your first million: It's behind an excruciatingly long, painfully difficult period of personal transformation where you become the sort of person who attaints their dream lifestyle.

Ultimately, money is a very "simple" thing: It's exchanged for goods and services, at ratios that make subjective sense to the people making the trades (meaning, it's fundamentally irrational).

But life is more than about just making money and spending it - it's also about living. And "living", as a construct, seems to be made up of (among others):

• Who you spend your time with
• What you focus your attention on
• What brings you joy
• How you feel about the work that you do
• How you feel about the people around you, and your place in society

In other words, a lot of non-work, non-money stuff. The subjective, ineffable, unquantifiable and unexpected parts of life seem to be the ones most worth living for.

Which leaves you with a choice: One way or another, inescapably, life is hard. If your dream lifestyle is a permanent "easy" life, with zero stress and everything working out your way, I've got some rather unfortunate news for you. At best, you're gonna get that in bursts measuring days-to-weeks, and that's with lots of hard work and careful planning.

So you're going to have to choose your hard: Fundamentally, you're either going to swim with the tide, or against it. If you're one of the very, very few lucky souls walking this Earth (born to good parents and an extended family, financially secure, educated, the ability to go in any direction you want), chances are you're gonna swim with the tide and be generally okay. Good for you!

For the rest of us - we're gonna want to look into the "swimming upstream" side of this: Going above and beyond our immediate peers in terms of effort, attitude, motivation and vision for the life we want. We're going to have to be prepared to leave friends (and sometimes family) behind, do grueling hard work, never-ending learning, dealing with uncertainty and failure on a regular basis, and generally only seeing the big picture come together in the rearview mirror.

Achieving It, 2024

Which brings me back to the R100k figure. My belief is that it is possible, as a South African, to:

• Figure out a problem space, service or solution that really excites you
• Find customers on the internet for it
• Start making money doing that on the side
• Eventually make enough money doing that so you can go all-in
• Re-build your daily life around your own vision and expectations, rather than what was decided for you by the circumstances of your birth.

Yes, it will take an absolute ton of work - balancing whatever you're already doing, plus learning new skills, taking risks, working long hours, you name it. But how would you go about it?

Achieving It, 2024, Greater Detail

I've reached this milestone myself, roughly via:

• Learning how to code when I was very young
• Finishing school and building some portfolio websites
• Being recruited into a marketing company where I worked for the next 10 years
• Went freelance with those skillsets, then built a small business around it
• Shut that business down, doubled down on consulting my largest client

An "easy" ~28 years or so worth of effort, all told! If I were to do it again, knowing what I know now - and with the internet being the absolute miracle that it is - I'd:

• Get really good at one skill (for me, that's designing and writing web software)
• Find people who are willing to pay me to apply that skill
• Identify common, repeated pain points across multiple customers that could be solved with an "80/20 product" (solves 80% of the problem, leaves 20% up to the user)
• Build that product so I can scale out my value-add without scaling up my time spent
• Profit, I guess?

Point 3 is roughly where I am in my journey right now: Having solid, reliable, great-to-work-with clients is fantastic, but I know in my soul I'm capable of more, and that's what I'm personally starting to push for.

My primary skill might be software dev, but if there's two things I've learned:

1. You can pick up new skills when you need them, and
2. Being "T-shaped" (great at one thing, good at a few other things) is unmatched in the realm of effective problem-solving.

So if I had to list out the characteristics required for this approach to things, I'd say they're some combination of:

• Relentless work ethic. The ability to focus on a problem over long periods of time, not letting the inevitable lows and bad days derail you
• Being open to change. The market can, and will, humble you. Learn from it.
• Constantly curious - about yourself. Learning how to live is an active, conscious, directed skill that takes time, effort, and feedback cycles (journaling is great for this). Don't let life happen by accident.
• Helpful, responsive, polite, easy to get along with - all attributes that are very desirable to your customers, and attributes that could take a lot of heavy emotional lifting to cultivate for yourself.

The actual skill seems decreasingly relevant with the explosion of "creator economy" startups since the 2020 COVID pandemic. If you're personable, able to teach someone something, and have spare time, there are literally dozens of platform out there that will help you build and host courses for money. That's one of the most common routes into internet entrepreneurship, but it doesn't have to end there at all.

The main point is: People are doing this sort of thing right now. Going from zero to a "passive income lifestyle" (read as: Actively working on things you love with people you enjoy hanging around with and not stressing about money) usually takes years of applied effort and learning, and only a very small % of people who start out on the journey seem to reach their goals (I'd estimate 5%), but from those 5%, you'll hear basically the same thing: It was completely worth it.

Why work so hard?

But would all of that be worth it? How far does R100k/month go in South Africa? Depending on your specific circumstances, you should be getting around ~R67,200/month post-tax hitting your bank account with that.

According to SALDRU's Income Comparison Tool, if you were to net R67k/month as a sole individual with no dependents:

Surprisingly high, right? Literal "top 1%". But what if you had a partner and child to look after?

About the same, surprisingly! Here's some other top-line summaries from around the web:

• Wits University reckons a student should get by with around R10k/month, though being South Africa you might need a larger drinks budget!
• Numbeo reckons R38k/month is enough for a family of four, though this is crowd-sourced data (and I wouldn't put too much faith in it)

Another way of looking at it: The maximum you should be spending on your home (whether renting or buying) is 30% of your pre-tax income. What does R30k/month get you in terms of accommodation?

In Cape Town (arguably the most notoriously expensive place to live), a R30k/month budget gets you anything from a 1 bedroom, 45sqm apartment, to a 2-bed-2-garage 200sqm house.

That leaves you a solid R37k/month for everything else, which can buy you quite a lot!

No matter which way you look at it, if you're not already earning R100k/month topline (or you are, but you hate every minute of it), maybe it's worth looking around at some other things you could be doing instead!