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Why the same amount of money over time is not the same.

We all complain about how if someone saved they'd have so much money & how they "waste" things on unnecessary things but let me clarify things: Say a person earns R8000 for 12 months & works for 11 years, if you do the maths it amounts to over R1 million. So you can claim that if that person saved every cent over those years & not bought a single morsel of food, clothing or other items they'd be a millionaire but that's not how things work. If that person never bought food, they'd die in weeks way before the 11 years are up. If that person arrived to work with tattered clothes, his sanity would be questioned & might lose his/her job. Even if he/she were to buy no clothes & grow his/her own cotton & make his/her own clothes, that itself needs money & his/her strength which leaves him/her hungry & in need of food. You expect him/her to grown his own food too? Between growing his/her food & cotton to make his/her own clothes, where is he/she going to find the time to keep a R8000 salary job? Not to mention housing & perhaps transport costs. The person in the case study here can still save but probably couldn't save all of it for a multitude of reasons. 

Besides the cost of living over time, there's inflation so R1 million is a far less amount of money than it was ten years ago, despite being still a lot of money. Our case study's R8000 salary has depreciated exponentially in the 11 years & his/her cost of living has probably doubled. There, that is why R1 million over a long time is not the same as a lump sum once off R1 million. Because you can work with a lump sum, once-off R1 million but even it can be used up, we've all seen #Iblewit stories but R1 million over an extended period of time is just not quite the same & seems like far less money because, perhaps, in truth, it is.
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