The Business Report has an article in which they quote Standard Bank chief economist Goolam Ballim, stating that ” debt as a proportion of household disposable income has been rising steadily, climbing to 55.4 percent in the third quarter of last year from 51.4 percent a year earlier.”
Ballim goes on to project that ” household debt could race past the historic 62 percent attained in 1998 during the Asian financial crisis, which prompted the Reserve Bank to hike interest rates to well over 20 percent.
But he said local banks were …

I have just received my month advanced notice of what will appear in next month’s South African Law Reports from Juta, the legal publishers.
On the credit management front there seems to be a number of interesting cases reported.

The term “garnishee order” has caused some confusion in South African legal debt recovery. The average debtor and salary department mistake an emoluments attachment order for a garnishee order.
An emoluments attachment order is an order granted in terms of Section 65J of the Magistrates Court Act in terms of which an employer ( also referred to as a garnishee, hence the confusion) is ordered to make month deductions from a debtor’s salary and pay this to the judgment creditor or their attorneys.
The Garnishee order on the other hand is in …

The Statistics for civil cases for debt for December 2004 and for the year 2004 as a whole were release by Statistics South Africa on the 24th February 2005.
I will look at the year 2004 as a whole rather than the December alone. One must bear in mind that these figures do not include actions instituted in the High court, which court has jurisdiction where the debt is more than R 100 000.00 and where the parties have not agreed to the jurisdiction of the magistrates court.
Summons issued 1 594 …

There is a great credit management website which I have been meaning to tell you about for a while called CollectionIndustry.com.
While its primarily an American site designed for their market, there are alot of very useful and practical articles on collections and credit management which have a global application. An international flavour is added by our very own ubiquitous PIC Solutions – who added a number of practical articles themselves. You will have to register on the site (at no cost) to get all the benefits of the site but …

Bentley Credit Control

The Business Day reports that “demand for credit surged to a 13-month high in January as consumer spending continued unabated, all but ruling out a cut in interest rates next month.”
The article also says “Private sector credit soared 15,22% from a year earlier, after a revised 13,45% gain in December.
Although this was considerably below market expectations of growth higher than 16%, mainly because of volatility in the “investments and bills discounted” category, excluding this category, asset-backed credit grew 17%, compared with December’s growth of 16,12%.”
So the combination of the lowest …

Other than my business interests another passion of mine is rugby and after the weekends games this Shark’s supporter wasn’t a happy chappy.
But being the armchair sports analysis that so many of us are I was thinking about the 2 South African Super 12 rugby matches. Without going into my match analysis it suffices to say that this “expert” attributed a lot of the blame for the 2 losing teams poor performances to the coaches.
This lead my random thoughts over to the fact that coaching with all its sports connotations …