Sadly, we have become a society that is almost permanently online. You wake at 3am, perhaps only to check the time. Before your feet touch the floor, before that first glass of water, somehow the phone is already in your hand.
And there they are. Someone you went to school with is in Cape Town for the weekend. Scroll. Another has collected a new car. Scroll. Someone is standing proudly in front of a new house. Scroll. There is a birthday dinner at the newest restaurant in town. Scroll again. Someone else is posting from an airport lounge. Five minutes. Five different lives. Then you put the phone down and return to your own. Same bedroom. Same car outside. Same salary. Same business you have been trying to grow. Same loan repayment waiting at the end of the month.
Nothing about your financial position has changed in those five minutes. But how you feel about it might have. And therein lies one of the most easily overlooked influences on our financial decisions: comparison. Comparison is profoundly human. We understand ourselves partly in relation to other people. Their progress can show us what is possible, challenge our ambitions and even push us to do better. The trouble begins when comparison stops informing our decisions and starts making them.
You know your own finances intimately. You know the salary. You know the debit orders. You know what remains on the car loan. You know the geyser needs replacing and the school fees are coming. You know exactly how much is sitting in the savings account and precisely how unimpressive it currently feels.
Then you open your WhatsApp Status and compare all of that information with somebody else’s photograph, curated for the occasion. Or you go home for a cousin’s wedding. In the yard are relatives you have not seen in months. One has built a house. Another arrives in a new car. An old schoolmate appears to be doing remarkably well. On Monday, you return to work and the colleague earning roughly what you earn seems able to afford things you cannot.
What you cannot see are the financial arrangements behind those lives. That colleague may supplement their salary with another source of income. Their partner may carry most of the household costs. The relative with the new car may have no school fees to pay. The cousin building a house may have inherited the land, received family help or spent years saving.
Or they may simply earn considerably more than you do. You do not know. Yet you know your own finances down to the last debit order. And that is the imbalance: we compare everything we know about our own financial lives with only what we can see of somebody else’s. The comparison may feel precise because you can see the car, the house or the holiday. Financially, however, you are comparing two balance sheets when you have only been allowed to read one.
In Eswatini, the unread page matters more than in most places. The most recent household survey put the country’s Gini coefficient at 54.6, which places us among the most unequal societies in the world. Incomes here are spread further apart than almost anywhere, so the distance between what you see in that wedding yard and what your own salary can carry is often far greater than it looks. The feed simply compresses the top of that distribution into the palm of your hand.
WHEN WANTING BECOMES EXPENSIVE
The danger becomes financial when that feeling survives after the screen goes dark. Your perfectly serviceable car feels old. The house that was enough on Monday feels inadequate by Wednesday. The phone that worked perfectly well last week seems due for an upgrade. Nothing about those things changed. The reference point did. That can change spending. You upgrade the phone earlier than planned.
You stretch the vehicle budget because the cheaper model now feels embarrassing. You attend something you cannot comfortably afford because everybody else appears to be going.
None of those decisions alone have to wreck a financial plan. That is precisely why they deserve attention. Financial fragility is often built through ordinary decisions rather than one spectacular mistake. An extra E600 here. Another instalment there. A weekend put on credit. A more expensive car whose instalment technically fits.
Each decision is survivable. Together, they begin claiming future income. As we discussed in last week’s edition, two people can earn exactly the same salary and have completely different financial freedom because one has promised much more of tomorrow’s income away.
Comparison provides another route through which those promises accumulate. The banks’ own books show where those promises are going. Of every E100 households owe them, E43 is a house, E41 is unsecured personal credit and E15 is a car and the car’s share is the one growing fastest, now at its highest in six years. This is where living within your means becomes more sophisticated than simply spending less than you earn. Suppose you can technically afford an E6 000 monthly vehicle instalment. The bank agrees. Your salary can carry it. Notice how rarefied that already is: E6 000 a month is twice what the median employee in Eswatini earned in 2023 and roughly half the average professional’s salary.
Does that make the car affordable? Not necessarily. What happens to the emergency fund? Can you continue saving? What happens if school fees increase? Could you survive two difficult months without taking a quick loan? And what opportunity disappears because E6 000 has been committed every month for the next several years?
The full cost of a purchase, therefore, includes every choice it removes afterwards. That is why envy can be expensive even when you have enough money to satisfy it. It can persuade you to exchange financial room for social appearance. And appearances do not make repayments.
There is another side to this. Good financial behaviour is often terribly unimpressive to look at. Nobody posts: ‘Month 19 of the emergency fund!’ There is no glamorous photograph of a declining loan balance.
A retirement contribution does not sit beautifully under restaurant lighting. The person who keeps a seven-year-old car for another year does not receive applause each morning for the interest they avoided paying. Much of financial progress is invisible precisely because the money was not spent.
Consumption photographs beautifully. Restraint does not. So someone building wealth can spend an evening looking at other people’s conspicuous consumption and conclude that they are falling behind when, financially, they may actually be getting stronger. A car is visible. Liquidity is not. A holiday is visible. A paid-off debt is not. A large house is visible. The ability to survive six months without income is almost impossible to photograph. We are therefore easily drawn into comparing what is visible with what is valuable, even though the two are not necessarily the same thing.
BUSINESSES CAN BECOME JEALOUS TOO
Now take the same thinking into a business. A small business owner drives past a competitor’s beautiful new premises. Suddenly their own shop feels too small. The competitor opens another branch. Perhaps we need one too. They buy new delivery vehicles. We should upgrade ours. They introduce an expensive product line. We cannot be left behind. Comparison wearing a suit passes easily for strategy. The information asymmetry is the same one you met at the wedding.
You can see the competitor’s expansion. You cannot necessarily see its balance sheet. It may have an investor. The building may belong to the owner. Its margins may be twice yours. It may have negotiated unusually favourable finance. Or it may be overextended and six months away from discovering it. Again, you do not know. Copying the visible decision without understanding the economics behind it is therefore dangerous.
The proper business question begins at home: What does our own evidence justify doing? What are sales telling us? What do our margins permit? How much working capital will expansion consume? What happens if revenue comes in 15% below forecast? Can the existing business generate enough cash to support another branch, or will debt have to bridge the difference?
Those questions may produce exactly the same decision as the competitor made. Open the branch. Buy the vehicle. Expand the product line. But now the decision has been produced by evidence rather than envy. A competitor can be useful information. They should never become your financial plan.
COST OF KEEPING UP
There will always be someone with more. A friend will build before you do. A colleague will drive something newer. A relative’s business will expand while yours is still finding its feet. Someone younger will reach a milestone you had set for yourself years ago. Perhaps it will sting. That is human. But before that feeling reaches your wallet, it deserves interrogation.
Does the car solve a problem in your life, or did yours only become inadequate when somebody else bought one? Does the business need another branch, or did expansion become urgent when the competitor opened theirs? Is the holiday something you planned and can comfortably afford, or are you buying proof that you, too, are doing well? None of that argues for deprivation. Money should also buy pleasure, comfort and experiences. There is little wisdom in building wealth while refusing to live. The distinction is intent.
A sound financial decision should still make sense when nobody is watching. The car should fit your finances without the parking-lot comparison. The business expansion should survive the spreadsheet without the competitor across town. The holiday should still be worth taking if no photograph of it ever reaches WhatsApp.
Other people’s lives can give us ideas. They can stretch our ambitions, reveal possibilities and even provide useful benchmarks. What they cannot give us is the evidence required to run our own finances. Tomorrow morning, the phone will still be there. So will the houses, holidays, promotions and new cars. Look. Admire. Be inspired. But when it is time to spend, borrow or expand, return to the only numbers that must ultimately carry the decision: your own. Someone else’s life can inspire yours. Just don’t let it make financial decisions for you. Financial freedom is deciding on your own terms.
Mlungisi Ndwandwe is a seasoned strategy and investment executive with extensive experience in corporate development, capital allocation and business growth across international markets. He writes in his capacity as Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sicebi International Group Holdings.
