Explore the financial challenges faced by young black South Africans who support their families. Learn practical tips for managing your finances while fulfilling family obligations.
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For many young black South Africans, supporting your family becomes part of life from the moment you earn your first salary.
For some, it means helping parents with household expenses or paying school or university fees for younger siblings. For others, it extends even further, with responsibility continuing after graduation while siblings search for work in a difficult job market.
This reality is becoming increasingly common. Unemployment among people aged 15-34 is nearly 46%. Among those who have completed matric, 33.7% remain unemployed, and 12.2% of tertiary graduates are not in formal employment. As a result, many young professionals find themselves supporting siblings who simply cannot find work, often while also caring for elderly parents and contributing to the wider extended family.
While family responsibilities are deeply personal and often rooted in values of care, gratitude, and shared success, they can also place significant pressure on your personal finances. Without careful planning, these obligations can ultimately force young professionals to delay crucial milestones, including further education, home ownership, and long-term saving.
Conversations around family responsibilities require sensitivity: For many people, supporting family is not seen as a burden at all. It is simply what you do. This is why these conversations should never be about questioning these responsibilities. Instead, they should focus on helping you protect your own financial wellbeing so that you can continue supporting the people who depend on you.
Here are four things to consider if supporting family forms part of your financial reality:
1. Understand the full extent of what you contribute
Most people know roughly how much money they send home each month but overlook the additional costs that accumulate throughout the year. Tracking all expenses over several months gives you a far more accurate picture of your true financial commitments and helps you budget more realistically.
Planning for these commitments makes it easier to balance them alongside your own rent, transport, debt repayments, retirement and emergency savings, and investments. Looking after your own financial future does not need to be at odds with supporting your family. In many cases, it is what allows you to continue doing so over the long-term.
2. Protect every source of income that supports your family
Many young professionals do not rely on just one income. Alongside full-time employment, many also freelance, consult, run online businesses, or earn money through other side hustles to help meet their financial responsibilities. These additional earnings are just as important to protect as your primary salary.
Income protection - which pays a monthly income if illness or injury leaves you unable to work - may be worth considering as part of a broader financial plan for business owners and salaried employees. Equally, if you are self-employed, an independent contractor, earning from side-hustles, or working in a non-traditional or high-risk occupation.
3. Think beyond traditional life cover
According to Bidvest Life’s Risk Reality Calculator, a 30-year-old female is 10 times more likely to experience an illness or injury that prevents her from working for two weeks or more than she is to pass away before retirement2.
This is why risk benefits such as income protection and critical illness cover are just as important as life cover that only pays out after you pass away.
4. Make financial planning a normal conversation
Many young income earners invest considerable time researching a vehicle purchase or negotiating a home loan, yet very few seek financial advice early in their careers.
Understanding the different long- and short-term insurance solutions available to you and how they work together is essential to building the future you imagine. This is especially true when it comes to life insurance; understanding your most likely risks means you can protect yourself from unforeseen circumstances that might otherwise prevent you from taking care of yourself and your dependants.
Supporting your family should never mean leaving your own future unprotected. There are financial solutions designed for the realities many South Africans face today. The first step is having the conversation early and speaking to a qualified financial adviser who can help you build a plan around your own circumstances.
* Mhlongo is an underwriter at Bidvest Life.
PERSONAL FINANCE