This is one of the most asked questions on the internet. “How do I invest R500?”, R500 is not a lot of money to invest but there are ways in which you can make returns of over 100% from your R500. This is a guide on how to invest R500 in South Africa.
Traditional investments
There are traditional ways to invest money, these are the ways that pretty much guarantee that you will make returns or earn an interest on your investment. The only drawback with them is that they don’t pay a lot of interest. The highest amount of interest that you are likely to get is 10%, which is very rare.
10% on its own is a lot, considering that you invest a lot of money. You would earn R100 000 in interest if you were to invest R1 million at an interest rate of 10%. However, with only R500; you are looking at R50 per year at best. Waiting the whole year just to earn R50 is not that exciting.
Investing R500 once off using these traditional ways to invest is not the best idea, unless you want to invest R500 per month. R500 per month equals R6 000 over 12 months and would likely earn you an interest of R420 (7%). Traditional investments include savings accounts and fixed deposits, you would need more money to invest in other assets.
Investing in business
The most important thing to pay attention to when investing in any asset is the returns you will make. We have already established that you would get R50 at best if you investing using traditional ways. Would it be possible to use R500 to start a side hustle that would earn you more than R50? I think so, our top recommended side hustles cost less than R200.
The only drawback with investing your R500 in starting a side hustle is that you will have to put in some work. But you will definitely earn more than R50. Even if your side hustle earns you R50 per month, you would still make R600 for the whole year, which is way more than R50.
There are a lot of side hustles that you can start with R500, you can sell detergents, atchar and even chicks. However, our top recommended side hustles are blogging and YouTube. You don’t need any more to start a YouTube channel, you can use the R500 to buy props for your channel. The channel will likely earn you money within 6 months, the first pay check from YouTube is likely to be around R300 for an average channel and grow to R3 000 by the end of the year.
These estimates are for a poor performing YouTube channel with less than 20 videos. Let’s assume that you run a terrible YouTube channel and only start earning R500 on month 6 and average that for the rest of the year. You would have made R3 000 in total, this might not look like a lot but it’s more than R50.
I usually emphasize opening a YouTube channel more than blogging because blogging is way more difficult and requires you to get a lot of things right in order to see success.
Conclusion
A side hustle or business will double your initial investment of R500, which is something that traditional ways of investing will not do. Do you have any thoughts or questions? Comment below.
