10 ways to invest R500 a month
Half a grand doesn’t buy you much these days, not even a trolley of groceries; perhaps a dinner for two at a moderately upmarket restaurant, if you choose a cheapish bottle of wine.
Conversely, it’s probably not very difficult to find R500 a month to put aside for a rainy day. Let’s say you’ve given your budget the once-over and found a spare R500 that you can afford to put away month after month for at least five years. As with any investment, you want the best returns at as low a risk as possible, and preferably a savings or investment vehicle that is flexible enough to allow you to deposit extra or, in an emergency, withdraw your money at short notice.
You may be immediately attracted to the obvious safe banking options (or “solutions” as they are happily called in bank-speak), such as a debit order from your current account into a separate savings or notice account. But these generally offer very low rates of return. Looking further afield, you should find ways to earn a better return without necessarily taking on more risk.
At the very least, you want to beat inflation, which eats into your savings relentlessly and mercilessly, and which can result in an alarming drop in the value of your money over time - just how alarming is illustrated in the following example:
Assume you want to save up for a specific consumer item that today would cost you R30 000. If there was no inflation, your R500 a month over five years would exactly pay for it – you could stash the money under your mattress.
But assuming a constant annual inflation rate of 4.2 percent (the figure for year-on-year CPI inflation at the end of April 2011), the item will cost you R36 852 five years from now. You would have to save for more than an extra year to make up the shortfall (by which time the price would have risen again, to over R38 400!).
zero cash advance fee credit card - News

And we'll begin, of course, with the low interest rates offered by each of these standout credit cards. Purchase APR. With the Chase Freedom Visa, positioned as a worthy choice for those seeking a low interest rate credit card, you'll pay zero percent
With the Capital One Secured MasterCard, the cost of a cash advance is either $10 or 3 percent of the amount of each cash advance, whichever is greater. Both secured credit cards come from reputable companies with long histories of helping people
After the introductory period expires, a variable APR of 11.99 to 19.99% will apply to purchases, based on your credit profile. Cash advances. The APR for cash advances is currently 23.99%, varying with the prime rate. Penalty APR.
By far the best use of idle cash in a checking account is paying off debts, starting with those that charge the highest interest rates, says Ronit Rogoszinski, a wealth adviser at Arch Financial Group in Long Island, NY "If you have a credit card that

The bank guaranteed lines of credit to of six of the seven top payday lender agencies, according to a 2007 report by the center. Payday lending, which offers a small cash advance with an astronomical interest rate, often traps the poorest in a cycle of
The Main Reason Why Drawing Out Hard Cash ... - Clean Credit OK
It is actually a shared incorrectly recognized belief that anytime you’re extracting ready money with an ATM, charge cards get the job done identical to cash cards. Unfortunately while you acquire dough on your visa card is along the lines of borrowing from the bank hard cash that you actually simply can’t find the money for. Sometimes it seems fairly expedient, even though similar to most purchasers you can be uninformed about the excess penalties, in addition to the key reason why on the whole withdrawing cash with a credit card might be a terrible notion.
You should look first and foremost at the fees that you are going to be having to pay for if you’re withdrawing instant cash using a credit card.
- Real money withdrawals end up with an immediate charge of 2 to 4percent of the quantity extracted. - Lots of visa card firms get you to pay down the balance for products before you repay your higher than average-interest rate cash withdrawal debt balances.
These types of fees and penalties and charges won’t be invisible expenditures. It happens to be required, for legal reasons, that your credit cards enterprises expose all the documents with respect to charges pertaining to their facilities. This kind of material is more often than not outlined on the rear on the application file and on your recurring statements.
Store Card businesses offer you assorted answers with regards to additional commissions. When you withdraw real money out of your visa card, it costs a great deal more to process than it would in the event you make use of the card for a run-of-the-mill sale. There will be a greater prevalence of delinquency involving chronic real money-advance clients. The greater monthly interest rate along with the omission of any zero interest charging span are caused by the unwanted pitfalls suffered via the bank. Cash money transactions have a drastically bigger potential of inability to pay, sometimes on the grounds that if you end up withdrawing real money from a credit card account it’s often simply because you discover yourself to be in fiscal hardship therefore you perhaps have no money remaining inside your bank account.