As Expected Another 50BPS Rate Hike

Tried to post from the Leofinance frontend only to be given and error after it said it was successful. Lets hope it wont be long now.

With pay day for most employees over the coming days the reality is they are now earning far less than they were last month. The 50 basis points was expected and I suppose we can be grateful it wasn't the 75 that had been rumored last week. The prime rate is now at 11.75% so up is the only way things are looking most likely to the end of this year at least. Who knows what next year holds as I see no change by then either as there is no positive news coming out from the bottom of Africa.

All this means is if you had got your mortgage/bond at prime rate you would now be paying an extra R400-R800 per month depending on the loan. Throw in the car instalment and there goes another R150 and don't forget the credit card adding another R100 or so monthly. This is the reality of most house in South Africa when they wake up tomorrow as this increase has left them even poorer than they were 24 hours earlier.

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Many people are already on the edge having to fork out for extra energy covering the downtime of having no electricity. Now take that little bit they had away and hard choices have to be made. When you buy a house you always tend to max out and make a plan but we are in a trend where we have seen over 350 basis points being added thus far.

This is the trend since 2020 all self inflicted by having lockdowns so what did everyone expect?

Thankfully I have no outstanding balance on the credit card or a car loan to worry about, but I do have 2 properties. The one mortgage is peanuts and the other is taken care of externally so this does not affect me one bit besides the cost of everything rising around you.

That is a 25% increase in mortgage payments monthly just in the last 17 months and we a re not done yet. The powers that be meet again in July and don't expect anything different except maybe a 25 basis points hike if we are lucky.

I know we are not the only country that is facing the financial storm as there are others far worse off, but we are slowly catching you up. My brother put his house on the market in the UK 2 weeks ago and has his first viewing this weekend. The market being slow is not the word really as it is stagnant and didn't want to burst his bubble saying he should have had plenty of viewings already. Normally the first few weeks are the busy time for any new property hitting the market so he has a problem.

I need to offload my second property as soon as possible as we have had another water leak and this was reported to the water board over 1 week ago and they still have not been to fix this. Our plumber stated it is in the mains and he cannot do the repair yet it will affect our reading so who knows what this bill is going to be. 5 calls later and they have escalated this as a priority but maybe they will come and check next week. This will be a $3K water bill and kind of expecting a fight coming. Not great news is putting it mildly.