People across all income brackets are having to put their pride in their pockets and ask for help.
Middle class earners have been severely affected and are having to make drastic lifestyle changes to accommodate slashed incomes.
“It seems that people living on the bare basics and who were already experiencing hardships before the first lockdown of 2020 have been less affected than middle and upper class,” says Sebastian Alexanderson, CEO of National Debt Advisors (NDA).
If you were earning R6 000 a month when the lockdown hit, and are still earning and living off the same amount, then nothing much has changed for you.
On the other hand, if you were earning R40 000 per month and your monthly living expenses and debt repayments totalled R35 000 per month, but your income was slashed to R25 000 per month, then you were and remain in trouble.
Alexanderson, who also heads up Bamboo, a plant powered restaurant, teamed up with the NGO Breadline Africa last year during the heart of the pandemic to serve healthy meals daily to those who simply could not afford it.
“We did this as a Bamboo project because we knew there were so many people who were going hungry, but I saw so much of what we were experiencing at NDA reflected in our feeding schemes,” he says.
“Suddenly, it was not only the poorest of the poor who needed help, but middle and upper income families whose income had been completely lost or cut.
“It isn’t a matter of income. How much you earn is only important in terms of how much you spend, and if your expenditure is consistently more than your income for months at a time, then you should consider cutting down on your expenses, identifying your wants from your needs and getting help.”
Alexanderson says that too often many people deny the reality of their situation and leave it until it’s too late to find any viable solutions.
The Service Dining Room is an organisation that has been cooking meals for Cape Town’s hungry for more than 80 years, and they too are experiencing a huge increase in the number of people needing meals.
Karen Cain, operations manager at The Service Dining Room says that before Covid hit last year, they would normally serve breakfast to about 60 to 80 people, and lunch to about 250 people daily.
Recently they served over 170 meals at breakfast, and more than 400 meals at lunch.
That is a record high for them.
Cain says that since the start of adjusted level 4 on 28 June 2021, they have seen a spike in people from the restaurant industry.
“They come in looking very smart. Some of them have got somewhere to live, but they just can’t afford electricity anymore, and they can’t afford the cost of buying food.
“Before Covid hit, it was mostly homeless people and some of the refugees at Greenmarket Square who came for meals. Now it’s everyone.”
Sadly, many South Africans still see a bad financial situation as something shameful and don’t want to talk about it.
Yet, with consumer debt standing at over R1.9 trillion and so many people relying on the kindness of others to survive, I think we should let go of our guilt and shame surrounding our money.
On Sunday, adjusted alert Level 4 was extended for another 14 days, due a massive increase in Covid-19 cases.
There is no guarantee that it won’t be extended again as we do not know how long this third wave will last.
What we do know for sure is that we are still a long way off from returning to normal.
So please, stop spending unnecessarily.
Try to build some sort of savings and ask for help.
And stop trying to keep up with the Joneses, they are probably struggling too.
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Caption: VIEW: Sebastian Alexanderson
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