The financial security you deserve

By Lanre Oyetade

All said and done, given the tons of wise sayings and financial advice you may have garnered over the years; the heap of money-management books you could have read and the conviction you got from the foregoing, you, after all, only get the type of financial security/freedom you deserve; that which you act out.

Many of us are convinced that we need to do things differently from the way we are currently doing them if we are to end up being comfortable but we just keep doing these things the same way.

Victims of a Poverty Wish?
This makes me wonder if, deep down, we really have a Poverty Wish. You know, in my secondary school years, we used to spend a lot of money on comics; and there was this character in one of the comics that had this page titled Death Wish.

Now, this character, for whatever reason, would get himself involved in very risky undertakings that threatened his very existence – he had a Death Wish! So do many of us go through life as if we had an underlying, deep-down Poverty Wish motivating our actions; actions that negate our very convictions in matters of personal finance, wealth acquisition and wealth management. We are convinced about the benefits of one line of action but we find ourselves going the other way!

This column has had as its core the determination to assist the reader ‘wake up’ from his slumber of ignorance and complacency in matters of successful achievement and personal financial management and by the responses I’ve gotten since its inception, a number of people appear to have benefited from its contents and this gives me joy to no end.

Both good and bad news
Now back to the issue at hand: like Bob Allen would say, there is the good news and the bad news for all income earners: The good news is that if you are like the average Nigerian, earning at least N25,000 a month, then in your life time, over N12 million will flow through your fingers. That’s a lot of money. In other words, you’re already on track to be a lifetime millionaire.

But the bad news is this: if you’re like most people, you’ll spend it all, and after a lifetime of earning about N12 million, end up with almost nothing because nobody teaches us about money and its prudent management (or maybe simply because of the underlying Poverty Wish, which we have not managed to control).

We are all students or even worse, captives, of the school of hard knocks; we learn hard from our mistakes and these mistakes can be costly and the lessons belated. We receive no formal education in the most critical of all life skills – how to become financially successful. Yet, money is one of the most important subjects of one’s entire life!

Money, oh money!
According to Allen, some of life’s greatest enjoyments and most of life’s greatest disappointments stem from one’s decisions about money. Even your relationships would be greatly affected without adequate finance. In fact, most divorces result from disagreements about money.

Understanding money – how to make it, keep it and multiply it– is absolutely essential to your life, to your relationships, to your happiness and to your future.

Wisdom, not just knowledge
So is it not just time you took adequate care not only concerning reading this and other related materials to learn more about resourceful wealth creation, prudent wealth management and considerate wealth preservation, but also about putting such knowledge into practice? Is it not high time you moved beyond the seeming poverty wish many of us have deep in the subconscious and start expressing a wish for wealth and the good life by putting these wholesome concepts we have been privileged to learn from various sources into practice?

Is it not high time that we realised that it is not so much of the knowledge we have garnered over the years that really matter but the application of such knowledge for the benefit of humanity and ourselves to the glory of God. For it has been declared that wisdom is knowledge correctly applied so it is not enough to possess the knowledge to be referred to as being wise; we must equally correctly apply the knowledge. Then and only then can we hope to attain and possess financial comfort for this is the harbinger of the financial security we deserve! Think about it.

Till next Thursday, stay inspired, go ahead; act out all you have learnt so far and be financially secure.