An insatiable appetite for more can lead to disappointment

Feel free to reach out to PSG Wealth adviser Dawie Klopper CFP ® directly.

Will enough ever be enough? The opposite of enough is an unsatiable appetite for more. I can categorically confirm that, in my relations with clients over many years, there has never been a single one of them who ever told me they have achieved enough growth on their portfolio and please, let us take a break!

Is it wrong to buy or want another house or car or dress? We may argue the money you donate to charity is consumed, but when you build a house you invest in the country, create jobs and support economic growth.

So what is it with people who want to do just one more transaction, make the most of that one last lucrative opportunity? It reminds me of the property market in 2006, when people almost fought to buy off-plan housing units… At the time, you could make so much profit on your property that if you bought four units selling three a year later, you would have been able to pay off the last one with the profit on the remaining one. Why wouldn’t you do so?

People queued to get involved in new developments. However, when the properties were finally completed and ready for occupation, the property market collapsed and the four properties in the example above could not be sold or even leased out, to the detriment of the aggressive buyer.

The question remains: Is it greed that motivates this behaviour, or something else?

Some people are satisfied with what they have, but others who seemingly have enough already, will never be satisfied and always want to make a little more.

It also reminds me of an acquaintance of mine who wants to buy a property in the Western Cape, for all the right reasons. Then he can semigrate to the Western Cape, his children can go to university in that area and there is a good chance that the valuation of the property he buys will increase further.

He put in a lot of effort to research the market in and around Stellenbosch and identified a beautiful little farm just outside Stellenbosch, making an offer to buy the property. But, as things go, his attorney – who happens to be his crypto adviser – advised him that the next crypto buying cycle was imminent, according to his (the attorney’s) charts, and recommended rather using the deposit earmarked for the farm to capitalise on this crypto buying opportunity. With the extra profit, he would be able to buy a much bigger farm and be much better off.

Yes, your guess was spot on. The crypto market collapsed, the acquaintance’s funds took a serious knock and he had to abandon the idea of buying a small farm. To date, he has not yet been able to accumulate enough funds for the move to the Western Cape. In the meantime, the value of the real estate in the Cape area has appreciated substantially, and buying the small farm outside Stellenbosch now seems to be a pipe dream.

Was it a case of greed to abandon the first transaction or overestimating his investment capacity, or was it a case of enough is not enough? Perhaps a touch of all three?

But how do you avoid something like this happening to you? Morgan Housel writes the idea of having ‘enough’ might look like conservatism, leaving opportunity and potential on the table. This is not true though. ‘Enough’ is realising that the opposite of enough – an insatiable appetite for more – will push you to the point of regret. So for now, the Stellenbosch farm is only a dream.