Building blocks
Nicolette Mashile takes us back to her childhood to share some of the big money moments that shaped her and her future successes.
Sanlam Moola-Money Family Game Show
Season 2 Sundays SABC2 (*192) 19:30
Hosts Nicolette “The Financial Bunny” Mashile and Tyson Ngubeni (aka Bob O’Conner) are back on SABC2 with the Sanlam Moola-Money Family Game Show, the reality TV the show that turns finances from fear to fun! Speaking of playtime, we turned back the clock to revisit little Nicolette’s early financial turning points…
RICH KID, POOR KID
Nicole learnt that money opened doors early on. While her dad paid all school expenses upfront, his budget didn’t extend to extras, like an interhouse sports uniform at her shiny new primary school. He just couldn’t afford more. So while Nicolette was excited, ready to run in her regular school uniform, she never got to as it wasn’t allowed. “I think that day is when I realised that there was such a huge difference between kids who had money and kids who didn’t have money. It was so hurtful. Even now when I’m not allowed certain things because of money, I’m like, ‘Why? What’s wrong? Why can’t I get it?’ I think it’s that nine-year-old inside me that was told you can’t run because my dad decided that he didn’t have enough money to buy me the interhouse uniform.”
MY FIRST BIG SAVE!
“At 10 years old, my dad would give my sister Bridget and I R5 every single day to buy food on the way to school. And he would say to us, ‘You must spend only R3.50 and leave R1.50 for bread’.” Being a kid, naturally Nicolette would spend the entire R5. “But somehow my sister Bridget always had the full R3 to be able to buy the bread. She anticipated that I would spend my money,” admits Nicolette.”
But she remembers a year she was driven by a fiery passion to buy a Tamagotchi (a digital “pet” videogame). And when Bridget pulled out of the joint project to save for one, Nicolette didn’t – she kept saving and she succeeded. “There was a magical thing that happened that first time that I saved up for something that was my own,” she shares.
MY FIRST BUSINESS
Nicolette entered the business world in high school, selling treats to her boarding school mates via an underground tuck shop that she ran with her friend Clementine. “All of a sudden, now I’m making money from my own efforts. I could control how much money I was making,” she says.
It taught her the value of having the perfect business partner. “Clementine was that friend that everybody was scared of. I did all the selling and the marketing, and she had a book where she would write, ‘Louise owes us this amount of money, Megan owes
us this amount of money’.” Clementine taught her about pricing too. “In the beginning I would ask the same price as what we bought the things for, and Clementine had to explain to me, ‘No, we need to make money!’”
Alas, there was a downside to having stacks of cash with no plan. “It became so easy for me to just spend the money and forget my natural instinct for saving. I spent too much money on food, man,” Nicolette says mournfully. Looking back, she wishes she had saved up for a cellphone.
MY FATHER’S CHILD
Grown-up Nicolette now admires her dad’s financial savvy. “Where money matters, my parents didn’t skimp. I went to Rhodes University, I lived in res. My dad took us all to university, and if you wanted to do a postgrad my dad would still pay for it. He was also never late with car payments. We didn’t have luxuries, but we had what we needed to have.
“But looking at my parents now I can see that they’ve got a lot of suppressed dreams and desires that they’ve had to shove to the side because they needed to be able to give us a little bit of an advantage,” Nicolette says. “To one extent, I’m very proud of him, to the other, it is sometimes very limiting. I think there is a whole big world (like travelling for fun) that I would love to introduce them to.”
And by watching The Sanlam Moola Money Family Game Show, maybe we can be inspired by tips on how to make our own dreams – and those of family members – come true.