The following feature is by Waceke Nduati Omanga, a personal finance expert.
Here are a few simple choices you can make every day to put you on the path to wealth:
- Choose to pay yourself. I don’t mean go buy something for yourself. You may enjoy the item, but you will have paid someone else for it. Track your spending just for one week and see who you are paying.
You may pay for transport or fuel, buy a newspaper, buy some lunch, do some groceries, tip somebody, meet someone for a drink, do your hair, give someone money, etc. In all these choices you are making, money is going to somebody else.
We usually do the same thing day in, day out for 52 weeks and then wonder why we did not achieve anything that year. Everybody else, apart from you, got a bit more money in their pocket because of the choices you were making.
You can choose to be part of your own gravy train. Just make some choices to ensure that a portion of the money you earn or have in your hands also goes to you. You can choose to carry lunch instead of buying lunch. The money you would have bought lunch with can go towards savings or investments, i.e. money that will work for you.
You can choose to shop more efficiently. You can choose to use your phone more economically. If you can shave of one hundred bob every day from your spending, you will be Sh36, 500 richer at the end of the year. It’s your choice.
- Choose to know and act rather than blame. My brother gave a sermon in church last Sunday. He is not a pastor by profession; in fact, this was the first time he was preaching in church.
His decision to put himself forward to do a sermon was motivated by the fact that people at his church were complaining about the quality of the sermons. Rather than add his voice to the complaints, he decided to become part of the solution and came up with a sermon, which was received very well. Are you choosing to be part of the problem or part of the solution? The fact that expenses will go up is not a surprise, so let’s not complain about the higher cost of living.
What is your solution to that? School fees are not a surprise unless your children appeared from thin air. To pay school fees on time, what do you have to do? To accommodate increases in expenditure what do you have to do? To go on holiday, what do you have to do? To get a job what do you have to do? What are you going to do to solve some of the problems in your home, workplace, neighbourhood, and society?
Nobody owes you anything, so blaming other people – family, employer, spouse, and politicians, is not going to resolve anything. Nobody cares about your life and ambitions more than you so what are you going to do about it?
- Choose to put yourself in a different frame of mind. Our environment greatly influences our thinking. If lack is all you think about, lack is what you will see and lack is what you will get.
So choose to think about something different and expose yourself to the environment that will allow you to think differently. I know someone who used to drive a matatu. He got a job as a driver in a particular company and because of his attitude and how he would go out of his way to understand the business and its clients, he was moved to office administrative functions.
We sponsored him for our personal finance programme and he started rearing pigs shortly thereafter. He struck up conversations with people who worked in one of the other organisations (in the same office building) that happened to be involved in capacity-building for farmers. He is currently on a farming tour in Germany that is fully sponsored.
My guess is that in a couple of years he will be wealthier than many people who might have more advantages over him. Choose to continuously expose yourself to something different.
Take a course, have a different conversation, read something. If your current social circle is not providing the kind of stimuli you need to create wealth, choose to spend some time with other people. Wealth is a choice.
