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Many South Africans spend more time planning their next holiday than developing a strategy for the next decade of their lives. Yet in a country as politically and economically uncertain as South Africa, having a deliberate family strategy to secure your long-term future is one of the most important things a family can do.

The Common Sense, with Frans Cronje, has developed a framework, set out in the chart below, for thinking about that challenge by dividing a family’s future into four quadrants. The four quadrants of the framework are wealth, income, geography, and children. Together, they provide a practical foundation for assessing your circumstances, identifying vulnerabilities, and developing a plan that allows you and your family to prosper regardless of the direction South Africa takes.

The framework rests on two central principles. You do not have to predict South Africa’s future at a single point in time to secure your own, and creating options is as important as the accumulation of assets and family members.

As The Common Sense’s scenarios show, while South Africa is most likely to become a fragmented enclave society, in which resilient middle-class households do well, the country could experience a period of political reform, much stronger economic growth, and improved public services. The country could also collapse into recession and anarchy.

The objective of a personal strategic plan is to position your family to do very well in the enclave future while remaining well-positioned to take advantage of a strong upside scenario and well-hedged enough to protect it against deterioration.

The first quadrant is wealth, meaning the money and assets you have accumulated. This includes savings, investments, pensions, property, and other financial assets. The strategic question is whether your wealth is sufficiently protected and diversified to withstand a range of economic and political outcomes.

A household with almost all its wealth tied up in one South African property, for example, has a very different risk profile from one with a diversified portfolio of domestic and international assets. The objective is not necessarily to move all your wealth abroad, but to ensure that your financial future is not entirely dependent on the performance of one country, currency, or asset class.

The second quadrant is income, meaning your ability to earn money in the years ahead. Income and wealth are not the same thing. A household may have substantial assets but weak future earning prospects, or a strong income but very little accumulated capital.

The questions here concern the security of your employment, the future of your industry, the competitiveness of your skills, and whether you have opportunities to generate income beyond the South African economy. A person with internationally marketable skills, or a business able to serve customers outside South Africa, has more options than someone whose income depends entirely on a struggling local market.

The third quadrant is geography, meaning where you choose to live. In South Africa, location increasingly determines the quality of the services, security, infrastructure, schools, and healthcare available to a family.

Two households with similar incomes may enjoy radically different standards of living depending on where they are located. The growth of private security, independent schools, private healthcare, and privately maintained infrastructure means that some communities are increasingly able to insulate themselves from aspects of state failure.

The strategic question is whether your current location offers the lifestyle, safety, and opportunities you require, and whether you have the financial and practical flexibility to relocate if circumstances change.

International exposure and options are a very important aspect of geography. This need not mean leaving South Africa. It means developing the ability to leave while, at the same time, securing the international exposure and contacts to expand your earning capacity into hard currencies even as you live in South Africa.

The fourth quadrant is children, and concerns the opportunities available to the next generation. For families with children, decisions about schooling, qualifications, skills, languages, citizenship, and international exposure may have consequences that last for decades.

A child educated to internationally competitive standards, with globally recognised qualifications and skills, will have a wider range of choices as an adult. The objective should be to give children the ability to build successful lives in South Africa and to be in the country as a consequence of a considered choice.

Taken together, these four quadrants provide a way of examining a family’s exposure to South Africa’s risks and opportunities.

A useful starting point is to ask five questions of each quadrant. What is our current position? Where are we most vulnerable? What options do we already have? What additional options could we create over the next five years? And what practical steps should we take over the next 12 months?

The answers should be written down and converted into a practical plan with clear priorities, measurable objectives, and deadlines.

For one family, the priority might be to reduce debt and build offshore investments. For another, it could be to acquire new professional qualifications, move to a better-managed town, or provide children with access to internationally recognised education. For an older couple, the focus may be on preserving capital, healthcare, estate planning, and ensuring that surviving family members are financially secure. All the while, this should be done with a sound understanding of the broader political, economic, and global forces that will shape the environments in which your family chooses to live, work, and invest its money.

This is an exercise worth undertaking with your financial adviser, wealth manager, and estate planning advisers, as, too often, financial planning is conducted in isolation from the broader political, economic, and social environment in which a family lives.

Professional advisers can help translate the four quadrants into decisions about investment diversification, insurance, retirement provision, property ownership, trusts, wills, tax exposure, and succession arrangements. These decisions must be tailored to each family’s circumstances, against an expert political and global understanding, rather than approached through a single formula.

The most important measure of the success of such a strategy is not necessarily how much wealth you accumulate. It is how many meaningful choices you create for yourself and your family, and a family with financial reserves, portable skills, the ability to relocate, and children equipped to compete internationally will have considerable resilience to thrive in any future South African environment. That, ultimately, is the objective: to thrive regardless of the decisions made by politicians, whether in South Africa or anywhere else in the world.