So many Zimbabweans in the diaspora are working hard to support their families they left back home. There are a few who don’t necessarily send any sort of support to their families but feel compelled to because they know things are tough. Those who are supporting their families are finding it harder and harder to do so because of the global credit crunch. They are finding that their cost of living is increasing and they are also having to send more and more money home to meet their families needs.

As already mentioned, people are feeling the pinch as the cost of living rises significantly due to the global credit crunch and after taking care of the all the bills, credits cards, loans and so on that they need to attend to, there isn’t very much if any left over to send home. What is making it even harder now is the dollarization of the Zimbabwe currency. Yes, the dollarization of the currency and the introduction of foliwars (Foreign Exchange Licensed Warehouses and Shops) may have been a God send in that it has made food more readily available if you have the forex. On the other hand, it has pushed the prices of basic commodities and just about everything else meaning larger amounts of hard currency are needed to meet day to day needs.

A short number of years ago, you could manage to do a bit with a couple of hundred pound sterling or U.S. dollars but in this day in age that amount of money does not go very far. The need to send more money means having to work more. Some people are on the clock almost 24 hours a day for days on end doing what it takes to keep themselves and their families alive. Some have literally worked themselves to death – the irony.

When there is food available it is expensive, decent medical attention requires payment in foreign currency, some schools have even started setting their fees in U.S. dollars which after a near collapse of state run schools may put education further out of reach. The Zimbabwe dollar is becoming less of an accepted form of payment and the dollarization has put so much out of reach for so many people and may actually be killing Zimbabwe. The credit crunch isn’t helping diasporans who are trying to support loved ones. Not only Zimbabweans at home are suffering, those abroad are finding it more and more difficult to survive and help their families at the same time. This poses one question: is it really worth it being wherever they are in the world as opposed to being at home and trying to make ends meet there?

Zimbabwe’s economy might be in the doldrums but there are people there who are making a lot of money. Patrick M at Zimbablog wrote an article on ways of making money in Zimbabwe, “The 13 best ways to make money in Zimbabwe”. He outlines a few things that people have been doing to make themselves ridiculously rich. Some of the methods highlighted in his post include selling fuel, trading in forex and Zim dollars (believe it or not), selling food and alternatives to beating the frequent power cuts. That is not all people are doing to make money. The diamond craze that hit the country a couple of years or so ago is till very much alive despite the efforts of police to try and stop their illegal mining and dealing.

The other day I caught wind of another way in which people are making money called ‘burning money’ where people take advantage of the very wide gap between the cheque rate and the cash rate of the US dollar against the Zimbabwe dollar. If you want to cash your US dollars you will get a much lower rate for it than if you were to go to the bank and exchange it for Zim dollars which are deposited into your account at a much higher rate. For example, if you cash US$50 it would be at a rate of lets say 30 000:1 and if you were to exchange it at a bank with the funds being deposited it would be at a rate of lets say 2,180,000,000:1.

The most obvious choice would be to exchange the money using the bank transfer rate but the problem comes when you want to withdraw your billions of dollars from the bank. If you have contacts at the bank you withdraw the money and then go to parallel market to buy US dollars at a rate of lets say 40,000:1. If you do the math you can see that you end making a very good profit. For those that cant get that amount of money out of the bank, what they do is go to a company and buy some sort of goods such as cement or Econet’s pre-paid buddie top-up cards with a cheque and sell them on the streets for cash.

The kinds of profits that people who ‘burn money’ make can be a bit mind boggling with the number of figures involved in the calculations but those who deal with them on a daily basis are used to it.

One thing though is that with people managing to make huge amounts of money from their forex in both US and Zim dollar terms, a number of industries or should I say those that are left are struggling to survive. They are struggling to survive because everyone is out there trying to get their hands on some of that money and those that have the money are clearing out companies and selling their goods.

Some may see this as being immoral and that the people who are out there carrying out such trades are further destroying the economy. The authorities may be out there trying to clamp down on such activities but as they close more and more loopholes and make it harder to carry out these trades, people are finding other ways of making ridiculous amounts of money. The way I see it, it’s just survival. It’s amazing how people can thrive in chaotic conditions.