Tag: tax bracket

As South Africans braced for a heavier tax burden, the 2025 Budget Speech delivered a mix of relief and reality. While tax increases were lower than feared, financial advisers will soon need to navigate a complex landscape of regulatory reforms.

It was the late noughties that saw the most prominent emergence of digital tools, which in turn paved the way for a whole new generation of investment companies in the form of online trading platforms. Since then, spurred on by rapid innovation, emerging inventions like cryptocurrency and the speed of its mainstream adoption have put online trading into overdrive.

With the budget speech being delivered in an election year, I expect to hear populist promises and over-optimism which is geared more to voters than the financial markets. We will need to scrutinise the numbers coming out of the budget very carefully to see if Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s budget proposals are viable and achievable given the country’s high debt burden and strained tax base.

Minister of Finance Enoch Godongwana will deliver the 2024 Budget Review to Parliament next week as the South African economy faces a gloomy economic outlook. The economy is still recovering from the impact of COVID-19 and state capture.

Nobody enjoys paying tax, but since it’s our legal obligation, we may as well make the most of it by legitimately saving where we can. Because tax savings - even if fractional - compounded over prolonged periods of time can contribute significantly to any person’s financial position.

At first, the response to government’s power moves, announced at last month’s Budget Speech, was overwhelmingly positive. Energy packages, which offered tax incentives for households and businesses to offset the steep financial toll of load shedding, were introduced.

The National Budget delivered by South Africa’s Minister of Finance, Enoch Godongwana, showed that government is making some significant financial commitments to restore Eskom to viability and maintain social grants. But with GDP growth projected at 1.4% on average from 2023 to 2025, and a potential tapering-off of the commodities boom over the medium term, how will government fund these commitments?

As the year quickly draws to a close, we have been inundated with queries regarding their expected annual bonuses in December. Many of the enquiries stem from employees who don’t know if their bonus constitutes a thirteenth cheque or a performance bonus.

As expected, this was a conservative budget with no sweeping changes to most forms of taxation. The Finance Minister took advantage of some new revenue sources such as carbon taxes, but, for the most part, continued to stick to the script of limiting bracket creep adjustment, sin taxes and fuel levies to raise more money.