WebPension · Peter Carruthers · Since 1999
The rand didn’t fail you.
The world just kept moving in dollars.
I want to start there. Not with a pitch. With what actually happened — because I lived it alongside you, and I’m tired of watching good people carry blame that isn’t theirs.
In 1990, one rand bought one dollar. Today it takes seventeen. Sometimes twenty. That pension we built, those savings we protected across thirty years of hard work — they didn’t shrink because we were careless. They shrunk because the rand did. Every crisis since 1990 took another bite: 1998, 2002, 2008, COVID. Each one knocked the rand lower. Each one imported more inflation. Most of what we buy is priced in dollars. We earn in rand. That gap has been opening since before most of us noticed it.
We watched Zimbabwe’s dollar collapse to five trillion to the USD. We watched pensioners — people exactly like us, people we knew — wiped out overnight. We told ourselves South Africa was different. Maybe it is. But the fear never left. And it shouldn’t have. Currency risk is real, and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.
Many of us never had the option of a company pension. I’ve been diabetic since eleven — no corporate job in South Africa for me, which is why I went out on my own, made every mistake possible, and went so far under in 1992 there was nothing left to sequestrate. In 2008 my thyroid collapsed and I spent two years wandering in a fog I didn’t recognise as illness. Those of us who ran our own businesses, or moved between jobs and left retirement savings behind each time — we played by different rules. The system compared us against people who spent forty years in one organisation. That comparison was never fair.
What’s keeping you up at 3am isn’t a personal failure. It’s thirty years of global economics landing on one household.
But the shame is real. I know it is.
There’s a moment — and if you’re reading this, you know the one — where you have to say no. To dinner. To your wife, who trusted you when you said it would be alright. To yourself, when you compare where you are to friends who spent their careers in real companies with real pensions.
That shame doesn’t just hurt. It fogs everything. It makes decisions impossible. It makes you distrust your own judgment. And it sits between you and every solution you try to look at clearly. It has to be named before we can move past it. So I’m naming it.
You are a tiny piece of a very big problem that was foisted upon you. And the problem is not as fixed as it feels at 3am.
Why I know this — and why it took forty years to get here.
I was diagnosed diabetic at eleven. In South Africa in the 1970s, that closed doors before I was old enough to knock on them. Medical aids and insurers made sure of it — a diabetic was a liability, not an employee. So I never had the corporate option. I went out on my own in 1984 with no safety net, no pension scheme, and no plan B.
What I did have was a problem to solve: I couldn’t afford to advertise. So I taught myself direct marketing — the art of reaching people directly, without paying for the space between us. Back then that meant letters and brochures. Then faxes arrived and I used those. Then email came, and everything changed. Email is the purest form of direct marketing ever invented: zero cost, infinite reach, instant delivery. I understood that immediately.
My lightbulb moment.
The moment I understood what this really was happened in Knysna, around 1998. I’d found a marketing course online — physical files, shipped from the Internet Marketing Centre in Seattle, run by a man named Corey Rudl. Cost me about $200. I was using his techniques to build my list of small business owners, mainly to sell my seminars. IMC offered an affiliate programme. I wrote an email to my readers one morning, explaining the course, why it worked, what it had done for me — and sent it before heading to my daughter’s school to help teach her matric class.
At the back of that class sat a kid who usually slept through everything. That morning he was awake. He asked me how I made my money. I plugged my laptop into the projector, pulled up my affiliate results page at IMC — about two hours after the email had gone out — and gave the class a quick explanation of how affiliate marketing worked. The kid at the back leaned forward and said: “Wow. You made 2.5 million in two hours without leaving home.”
I looked at the screen. He wasn’t wrong about the number — he was wrong about the currency. It was $2,500, not R2.5 million. But standing there looking at it, I was as stunned as he was. Two hours. One email. No office, no stock, no travel. By the end of that month I had R12,000 in the bank from that single campaign. Over the next four or five years, that one product relationship brought in the equivalent of about R1 million. That’s when I knew this was real.
By 2006 I was running a seminar series called Netfontein — a play on “net” and the “fontein” in towns like Bloemfontein — teaching exactly this approach to South African business owners. The principles I taught then are the same principles that drive WebPension today. What’s changed is the implementation. What used to require expensive tools, months of setup, and a steep technical climb now takes minutes and costs nothing. The platform is free. The templates are built. The skeleton is ready for you to walk into.
Here’s what we’re actually doing.
The model, plainly
Think of an insurance broker. A broker doesn’t manufacture the policy. They don’t write the terms or run the claims department. They make one introduction — the right person to the right product at the right moment — and they earn a commission when that introduction becomes a sale. Then, for as long as that client keeps the policy, the commission keeps arriving. One introduction. Recurring income. That’s this.
The web is full of products and services from the best companies on earth — software, training, tools, services — and those companies want help reaching their customers. They pay you when someone you introduce becomes a buyer. No course. No book. No product. Make the right introduction, and let the system do the rest.
We each carry a lifetime of skills, stories, and hard-won knowledge — from our businesses, our hobbies, our families, our fields. We are the first generation that can share that experience directly with people anywhere in the world, at no cost, and be paid for doing it. That experience is our biggest asset. Our second biggest: we’re not chasing a fortune. We’re aiming for a modest, reliable income in dollars — a target most online marketers would consider too small to bother with. That’s exactly why we can reach it. Our parents never had an option like this. We do.
When you reach your income goal, the system keeps working. It doesn’t need you to be there. The introductions you made last year are still paying. That’s the difference between this and consulting, or freelancing, or anything else that stops the moment you stop.
You earn in strong currencies — not rand
USD $
GBP £
AUD $
CAD $
For some of my readers, an extra $100 a month changes everything. For others the target is $2,500. The number is yours to choose. The point is that once you hit it, it holds — because it’s not in rand.
What you don’t need to do.
You don’t need to write a book or create a course. You don’t need to design a website, write code, or learn any tool that doesn’t make immediate sense. A sales funnel: one click. An email sequence: one click. A newsletter: one click. The technology that used to take months and cost thousands is gone. What remains is a steering wheel, a brake, and an accelerator. That’s all you’re given, because that’s all you need.
And you’re not doing it alone. There’s a question box under every lecture. Email me directly. WhatsApp if you prefer. Video calls when needed. I can come into your account and fix it myself if that’s what it takes. I’ve been answering questions within 24 hours for thirty years. I’m not stopping now.
From people already inside.
“I am blown away with your series of lectures. I could progress at my own speed, flip back to check a point. This is revolutionary — an absolutely magic way to convey training.”
— Renee
“You’ve really hit the sweet spot. Once I’ve learned the skills and started generating income, I’d love to help others do the same.”
— Anton
“I am blown away by your swift reply. I honestly did not expect you to take so much time. I highly value your effort and dedication.”
— Joan
But what do I actually bring to this?
That’s the question every reader is asking by now. Here’s the answer.
There are three components to this engine. The first is your content — your writing about what you know: your experience, your field, your stories, your mistakes, your hard-won knowledge. The second is delivery — the website pages and emails that carry that writing to the people who need it. Both of those flow from the third and most important component: your history. Your family. Your hobby. Your career. Your challenges. The life you’ve already lived.
We work with a set of free tools that help you draw that history out, identify which parts of it are most likely to connect with an audience, and turn them into world-class emails, pages, and stories. The platform handles the rest. We’ve removed the technical burden so that what remains is the one thing only you can bring: yourself.
Before we start — Rearview
The biggest question in this whole process isn’t about technology or affiliate programmes. It’s this: what experience do I have that will make this work for me?
We answer that together in a 90-minute session I call Rearview. We look at you — what you’ve done, what you know, what worked and what didn’t — and we emerge with your first project. Not a vague idea. A specific direction, shaped around your life, ready to build on.
You don’t arrive at this blank. You arrive with sixty or seventy years of material. Rearview is simply the process of finding which part of it the world most needs to hear.
And you have 60 days to decide whether this is for you. That’s not a small-print promise — I schedule the review early, deliberately, so that if it’s not the right fit we find out before it costs you anything that matters. You won’t be left to drift for two months and then ask for your money back. We’ll know well before then.
Monthly membership
$27 / month
The platform we use is free — no subscription, no hidden costs, nothing else to buy. The $27/month is the only cost. It covers the mentorship, the lectures, the support, and my personal involvement in getting you there. Cancel anytime.
Start your membership →
60-day full refund. Email me. No forms, no questions, no hoops.
I’ve been running this process since 1984 — in cities and towns across South Africa, in the UK, in Norway, in Spain, and now in Canada. The process doesn’t change. What changes is the person sitting across from me. And that’s the point.
The web is not a physical village where you need to come to my store. Your PC can reach any other PC on earth. That gives you something no previous generation has ever had — the freedom to live anywhere, and earn from anywhere. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I’ve been doing exactly that. This is the system that makes it possible. I built it because I needed it. I’m offering it because you do too.