#014: Value for money

Until now, most episodes of The Fat Wallet dealt with investment concepts. When it comes to money, however, smaller personal finance choices can arguably have a much more profound impact on your financial well-being. We address this often when we talk about keeping your lifestyle costs in check.

A concept as simple as "value for money" can be immensely complex, as we discover in this episode. When you have all the information to quantify value in terms of price per unit or use, you can make an informed decision pretty easily. The trouble is, when it comes to consumer goods there's a huge incentive not to make all the information available. Add to that the amount of options available to consumers and you soon find yourself paralysed by indecision in a straightener isle on voting day. I know this pain.

In this episode I rally the forces. Simon Brown, Petri Redelinghuys and Dineo Tsamela all pitch in to help me figure out how to quantify value when you don't have all the information. While all of us have excellent ideas, I'm afraid there's once again no tidy answer. This is probably the most frustrating thing about money - tidy answers are few and far between.

That, by the way, is also why we don't check our language in this show. Money is a bastard. It ruins lives, it causes divorce, it drives people to do crazy things. Corporates have to gloss over the very messy, dangerous underbelly of money to sell you products that make you feel safe. As consumers of those products, we feel everything but safe and comfortable in the world of money. We hope having frank, messy conversations about money helps you to do the same.

Kris