Sipho Shongwe

A lot of people meet credit for the first time at the worst possible moment, when the money has already run out and a decision has to be made fast. I write for exactly that person.

Not the finance expert, not someone who reads contracts for a living, but the reader who has never been shown how any of this works and has no time to figure it out alone.

I came into this through credit literacy rather than banking. What pulled me in was how much of the trouble people fall into is really an information problem. Nobody told them a small loan can carry a big fee.

Nobody said that paying a collector a little to show good faith can restart a debt that was almost dead. These are not complicated ideas once someone lays them out. The harm comes from them never being laid out at all.

So at Instant Fund I write the groundwork guides, the ones that start from zero. What a debit order actually is. How to read a loan before signing it. What a credit score is and why it matters.

I try to write them the way I would want something explained to a younger cousin: patiently, and without making anyone feel foolish for not already knowing.

Four years of this has made me careful.

I have seen how one confident-sounding sentence on a website can send someone in the wrong direction, so I check what I write against the real rules and would rather leave a question slightly open than answer it in a way that could mislead.

I work from Durban, and the readers I picture are ordinary South Africans meeting these decisions for the first time. My aim is simple: that someone finishes a guide feeling less anxious and better able to choose.