In this week’s episode we share our stories and what it’s been like to run a business where we loan people money and they refuse to pay us. We talk a lot about getting out of debt, but we rarely talk about the people that are owed money and how it affects their lives and businesses.

We hope that this podcast leads to a deeper conversation about debt and the importance of paying the people you owe.

In this week’s episode we talk to Khumo Nawa from Botswana. Khumo has been in the banking sector for 15 years and decided at a young age that she wanted to be out of the corporate world by the time she was 35, but she started working and forgot the dream. In 2016, she found herself feeling unfulfilled and drifting into depression and ended up leaving her job prematurely in 2017.

Luckily, she acquired her first property in 2011, a 2 bedroom house on a piece of land, when she had read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, in the same year (2011) she decided to get a 500,000 Pula loan to build a 3 bedroom house for herself to live in. She rented out the 2 bedroom to a tenant.

When she left her job in 2017, she didn’t have enough money to pay the loan because her side hustle and tenant income didn't cover her expenses. She ended up in court with the bank, in February 2019, the court granted her a settlement agreement.

At this point she realized that she needed to plan her finances differently, in March 2019, she decided to go back into the corporate world. She was goal driven and she knew why she was working. She decided she was going back to the working world for 2.5 years.

Her first goal was to get rid of all her bad debt, she had a million Pula in mortgage and personal loans. She changed her lifestyle drastically, she went back to the village, because it was much cheaper there so she could direct her money to achieve her goals. She was able to pay off 340,000 Pula in debt in 17 months.

After settling her debt, she ended up with 17,000 Pula free every month. She looked at the village and decided to use a 2,000 sqm plot for 85,000 Pula in the village, which she had acquired in 2013 and decided to build 1 room houses for people in the village. She built 1 block of rooms (each block had 3 rooms) for 75,000 Pula close to a technical college for students and had a waiting list for students for accommodation and rented out the unit for 1,800 Pula per unit. She had determined she needed 16,000 Pula per month to be financially free.

She had an opportunity to get a loan, because she named the project her financial security project, to a level where this project can take care of her. She decided that if she used debt, she would want it to be short debt and she could be in and out quickly

She also started a blog and started showing everyone how she was able to use their salary to create financial freedom. She started showing people how they could use their salary differently and attracted a lot of people to the blog and she started coaching and selling products on her blog.

She decided that 50% of all her income would go towards her real estate and building her portfolio.

At the same time a mall was being built near her property; people started looking for accommodation and she built studio apartments where each block is rented out for 4,500 Pula.

She is currently looking for 540,000 Pula for 12 months to build 3 blocks of studio apartments. She is not looking for equity partners, she is looking for people who want a better return on investment than their bank or financial institution can provide them.

This is a really incredible episode.

In this week’s episode we talk to Lester Philander, a property investor and the founder of Corp Cafe based in Muizenberg, South Africa.

He started his property journey by making an offer on a property in Mitchell’s Plain, but ended up quitting his job to start his business after getting the initial approval but not the final approval, so the process fell through. A few years later, he and his wife bought their first property to live in Muizenberg and later bought a second property with 3 units on the premises to help family members by renting it out to them. They are now planning to rent that property out to other tenants.

During Covid, he announced that a lot of coffee shops were closing down. So he developed a concept called “rent my restaurant.”

He invested R80,000 into a restaurant, signed a lease and confirmed a lease and then rented out the property to a restaurant owner. The idea was that as a restaurant owner, you would then lease the restaurant with everything in it and you just focus on managing the restaurant and paying them a set fee of R10,000 a month.

The result was great, but he realized that he wanted to make more than R10,000 a month and that Cape Town had more coffee shops per capita than New York City, which means that for a coffee shop to succeed they need to offer a bit more than other coffee shops on the market.

They then started a franchise model (Corp Cafe) where their franchisees can become a hands off restaurant owner (they manage the coffee shops for you), where they buy the franchise for R450,000 and in return Corp Cafe will manage the restaurant and pay the franchisee R10,000 a month (a 24% yield per annum) and reinvest the extra R20,000 profit and leave it in the business bank account for the franchisee to use at a later date.

They currently have 10 stores open and they plan to set up two stores every single month from now on.

This is a really incredible episode.