Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa October 2014 | Page 7

INVESTOR TALK FROM THE EDITOR D harma Rose of Abundant Entrepreneur recently wrote: “Success is never about your resources, it’s about your resourcefulness”. Resourcefulness is not about having huge sums of money, the “right” connections or even impressive qualifications. It is defined as “the ability to make do with what is available to create a solution”. It is being inventive and enterprising. It is the ability to make decisions and act on them, doing what you can, where you are and with what you have. FROM THE PUBLISHER R eal Estate Investor Magazine, in partnership with Rode, just presented a hugely successful roadshow to over 500 people around three cities in South Africa. Our speaker line-up included the likes of Dr Dolf de Roos; John Rabie, the legendary Cape Town property developer; Amelia Beattie, head of Stanlib Asset Managers, who spoke about their retail expansion into Africa; plus a trio of wise economists including Etienne le Roux; economist of RMB; Cees Bruggemans, previous FNB chief economist; and Nicky Weimar, economist at Nedbank. It is difficult to talk about investing without considering the current state of the South African and global economies. The bad news flow seems inescapable and the prospects for the economy are not great. Gill Marcus, outgoing governor of the Reserve Bank, has laid bare a plethora of problems facing the country, including a depreciating currency, high unemployment, an everincreasing current account deficit, the R50 billion Eskom bailout, load shedding, inflation, labour unrest and policy uncertainties. Business and consumers are under huge debt strain while SARS wants to intensify tax collections. The collapse of African Bank has added fuel to the fire for indebted consumers, who are also the tax payers now expected to bailout this situation. Our cover story exposes the real impact of this issue. So how does one become resourceful? Expand your knowledge continuously. Acquire new ski