This Is Me

The earliest desire I can remember ever having was wanting to catch a fish. I so badly wanted to catch a fish that I forced my mother, at that stage it was just the two of us living together at the coast, to buy me a cheap little combo rod and reel set. With only a sinker on the end of the line I would sit in the shore break waiting for the “Big One” to bite! Needless to say I did not have much success…

Fast forward a whole lot of years later and I find myself sitting at an airport, typing this introduction, on my way to yet another big adventure to the middle of the Amazon rainforest in search of the next “Big One”!

By now I have been fortunate enough to have been able to embark on several international fishing trips to some of the most remote and utterly amazing places in the world. Guyana, Madagascar, Colombia, Thailand, just to name a few, have left me with some of my most memorable experiences I’ve ever had, and an insatiable desire to keep traveling even further in search of more wild adventures.

But this brings me to a point in my life now where I need to set myself up for the next half to be able to do more, but without being a slave to someone else’s dreams. Here I am talking about income! There is active income, working for someone and getting a pay check, and passive income, making your money work for you and being in charge of your own income and time!

For the past 16 years, I have been living and working in Taiwan as a private school English teacher. This job has offered me the opportunity to follow my dreams and pursue my passions by providing me with a decent enough steady income. For a long while I had supplemented my income with a second teaching job and thought I was doing pretty well for myself at that point. But the truth was that I was simply selling 90% of my time to others in order to experience true fulfillment only once a year.

I have always had a desire to be my own boss and be self-sustaining. I want to generate my own income and not spend my time working for others making their dreams come true. Over the years I have pursued a number of different ventures in search of a way out of my job. I tried selling fishing equipment at one stage, but quickly discovered that I was a very small fish in a huge pond, and without the proper backup service that idea quickly failed.

Then I discovered the world of forex trading. I spent a lot of time studying and learning to trade the markets. Pushed by the desire not to be part of the 97% of traders who never make it, I persisted for several years. The first year I lost 50% of my trading account, and I was never able to recover the money I had lost. Eventually fear of losing too much in the market led to me taking out what I had left and using it for another idea instead. And that was when SaffaFest was born!

As my wife, Mary, and I had been living in Taiwan for many years already, and were truly grateful for all the wonderful opportunities life in Taiwan had given us, we decided we wanted to give something back. So we came up with an idea to launch a festival that would showcase South African culture. The festival would bring South African music, food, sports, and culture to one place, for one day, and all our friends in Taiwan would get the chance to experience true South African culture for a day. At the same time, we’d also be bringing a little bit of home to the South African community living and working in Taiwan.

I threw absolutely everything I had, and more, into the very first SaffaFest event. I flew over my favorite musician from South Africa, Bok Van Blerk, to come and perform at the event. I booked out an entire camp ground and event area, built a huge stage and bought an insane amount of meat to feed the masses! Boy, what a HUGE learning curve that event was. I needed 2000 paying guests to attend the event just to break even, we could only manage to attract about 700…

Even though we did not get the numbers we needed, and financially we failed epically, the event was a HUGE success! All those who attended had nothing but praise for the event and we were inundated with requests to please do another.  

   

In my life I have been really fortunate to have been involved in a number of truly amazing, once in a life time experiences, and that first ever SaffaFest event will forever be one of my top five best experiences. I got to work with my favorite musician and even share some drinks and a ride to the airport with him. I was blown away to say the least. On top of that, the amount of joy we were able to bring to so many people is what gave Mary and I the courage and strength to keep doing it.

At this point (February 2023) it is now 7 years and more than 13 events later, and SaffaFest is still going. But now I must confess that due to the financial failings of the initial events, I personally struggled, but my wife’s love for creating is what has kept these events happening time after time. We have still not been able to recover any of the money we put into the events the first couple of years, but we have gotten SaffaFest to a place where it now has its own operating capital reserve, and about a year ago we finally had an event that made a profit! This is not to say that we can quit our day jobs and start living off of SaffaFest, far from it in fact. But at least we now know that we can start each event without digging into our personal finances anymore.

And so this is where I am now, still working a job as a teacher, organizing SaffaFest, and desperately needing to find a way to start generating passive streams of income. I love doing SaffaFest for the main reason that I am the boss and its successes and failures rest entirely on the efforts that Mary and I put  into it. It’s an empowering feeling and brings a sense of satisfaction and achievement that no job ever could!

My biggest goal now is to find ways to build my income and build my wealth that are totally reliant on my efforts, and the results I achieve will be directly influenced by the actions I take. I am sick and tired of my time belonging to someone else. I want to break free from the shackles of the everyday J.O.B. and have more time to spend with my amazing wife and my awesome dog ChiChi. They mean everything to me, and deserve more from me than just guest appearances at home during the times that I am not working, and me selling my time to realize someone else’s dreams.

I have committed myself to finding ways of living a better life, becoming financially independent, becoming the boss of my own time, and living the life I have always wanted. It is my goal to share all my successes and failures with everyone here, and hopefully be an inspiration for others to take action and pursue their dreams of living their dream life.