On Heritage Day the fire gets lit, the meat goes on, and the family gathers. Recipes get passed down, along with languages, stories and strong opinions about the Boks. Money usually does not enter the chat.
“We tend to think of heritage as what we inherit,” says Niresh Gopichand, Risk Director at Atlas Finance. “But there is another kind of heritage – the habits and attitudes children pick up from watching how their parents handle debt, saving, giving and financial setbacks. When families avoid talking about money, that gap does not remain empty. Financial literacy is not necessarily being neglected, but it is increasingly being shaped outside the family by products and messages designed to influence behaviour.”
Gopichand encourages families to be part of money conversations or risk them being driven by other influences. He proposes five conversation starters for families worth asking around the fire.
1. What is the most expensive lesson money has ever taught you?
Start with your own experience rather than someone else’s mistakes. Few young people respond to a lecture; most respond to a story – the car bought too soon, the policy allowed to lapse, the money lent to a friend and never seen again.
We learn more from what we got wrong than from what we got right, but only if somebody says it out loud. Families are good at protecting their pride, which can mean withholding the experiences most worth passing on. Stories are more memorable and likely to be remembered and reshared.
2. If we are not teaching them about money, who is?
South Africans gambled R1.5 trillion in 2024/25, up roughly a third year on year and mostly online, according to the National Gambling Board. What has changed is less the amount staked than how ordinary it has become: on a phone, mid-match, alongside popular sportspersons and influencers people already follow.
Betting is one example of a wider shift. Buy Now Pay Later has moved from novelty to standard checkout option, now including groceries: it feels like budgeting, but it is credit. Roughly 36% of credit-active South Africans, over 10 million people, hold impaired credit records, according to the National Credit Regulator’s Credit Bureau Monitor.
The common thread is design rather than temptation.
Financial decisions used to come with a pause. You had to go somewhere, complete a form or speak to someone. Technology has removed much of that friction, but that pause was often the moment when people stopped to think about what they were committing to. Today, convenience can make spending and borrowing feel less like financial decisions and more like everyday transactions.
With gambling, families should look beyond the occasional loss and pay attention to secrecy. Losing is part of gambling; the concern is when someone starts hiding their betting, stops talking about it or becomes uncomfortable when the subject comes up.
Try asking the family how many betting adverts they remember from the last match they watched and then ask whether everyone knows what each of their monthly debit orders is for. It is a simple way to start a conversation about how easily financial decisions can become part of everyday life without us really noticing.
If gambling has become difficult to control for someone in your family, the South African Responsible Gambling Foundation offers confidential support on 0800 006 008.
3. What are we carrying for other people, and does anyone know the number?
This is difficult in families where supporting relatives is part of life: one person pays school fees, another supports an elderly parent, a graduate finds several people depending on their first salary.
The difficulty is not the giving. It is that everyone depends on one person and nobody has discussed what happens if that income stops.
Concentration risk is usually discussed in terms of investments, but households face the same problem. We should ask what happens if the person carrying the responsibility cannot continue to do so.
4. If something happened to me tomorrow, where would you look?
Where is the will? Which policies are in place? Who knows about the pension from a previous employer? Most families find the gaps only when they have to deal with them.
The Master of the High Court estimates that more than 70% of working South Africans have no will, a figure cited by Legal Aid South Africa. Then there is property inherited but never transferred: if the title deed of the family house is still in a grandparent’s name, it is very difficult to sell, insure or finance.
Dying without a will does not mean there is no process. It means the law decides rather than the family which takes time, costs money and creates disagreements at a difficult moment.
Prepare a one pager document listing where the documents are, which institutions hold accounts and who to contact.
5. Who taught you to save, and how did they do it?
Not every financial lesson comes from a textbook or an adviser.
An estimated 800,000 stokvels move around R50 billion a year, involving more than 11 million people, according to the National Stokvel Association of South Africa (NASASA). They work because members contribute, follow rules and hold one another accountable and over generations have paid school fees, built homes and covered funerals.
That is financial knowledge already sitting inside communities and it is heritage too. The mistake is letting it be absorbed by accident rather than taught deliberately.
Ask the older members how their stokvel works, who keeps the records, what happens when someone misses a payment and whether it has a dedicated bank account and a second signatory rather than cash kept at home.
6. The September anniversary worth discussing
The two-pot retirement system turns two on 1 September. Repeat withdrawals are now common and the average claim has fallen to about R9,290, with roughly seven in ten below R10,000, according to Momentum, suggesting many are used for regular household pressure rather than emergencies.
Two details are widely misunderstood: withdrawals are taxed at the member’s marginal rate rather than the more favourable retirement lump-sum tables and the South African Revenue Service may deduct outstanding tax debt first.
While the two-pot system was designed for genuine need, the concern is when it becomes the answer to every month-end squeeze.
Heritage Day is usually about what we received. This year, it is worth asking what we are passing on. Keep it simple: one topic, no ambushes and one practical action at the end.
“You will leave your children your assets, but you will also leave them your habits,” says Gopichand. “A large inheritance disappears quickly in the hands of someone never taught to manage it. A smaller one goes much further when it arrives with the confidence to use it well.”
