I recently have been spending a lot of time on personal financing and investments options. I have also had to make friends whose thoughts resonate with mine especially financially. One thing that has happened a lot is me finding myself cutting out dudes I considered die-hard friends since I see their demands and value for our friendship isn’t mutual. In my escapades of course together with my best friend, we have explored many tools that could help improve our finances, and today, I must say there are so many learnings I have picked up yet again. I have also seen a pattern on how we make mistakes trying to find money, for instance, a betting maniac will look for loans from Friday morning to Saturday morning to bet weekend games with the thought that there is more than awaits them, only to be disappointed and the following week working hard to repay the small loan. Also the idea of shifting from betting apps seeking better services. Yeah, we have been through this, it has hurt us at times! Anyway, today let’s work out finances the right way.

My first piece of advice is that find a budgeting forum and app you could use. YNAB (you need a budget) is the best budgeting tool you’ll find anywhere. I have used it once but ended up developing my own since I like working with google sheets. I must say for starters, visit the YNAB website, it includes a forum that covers more general topics on budgeting and personal finance. I ended up telling myself that with finances, always put things on paper and track your performance on how this is going month on month. What I did when the year started was to decide on the projects for 2021 and developed a tracking tool that and further developed a budget for the projects. This is guiding me on how I align my finances.

Secondly, I would say be ambitious. With the 2021 projects clear, my budget had to be a little extra for purposes of pushing me to be better at meeting the timelines for achieving project evolution. My friend played a bigger role to have most of our thought projects included here to nudge me to improve on my spending habits. Actually, we have hit a snug in some projects currently at 29% instead of the expected 54%. But the learnings I am currently getting is that it has changed the way I view my needs and wants, I also spend most of my free time on social media but this time around rather than stalking people, marketing for business and selling farm produce to meet my recurrent expenses so that I can allocate more money to meet my set budgets. My social media pages are currently running ads and pushing brands for businesses, with the aim to make at least a dollar a day as an extra income to our finances.

Wallet apps were a thing I wanted in the past but over time I have grown to understand that if the savings are not earning anything then it’s worth investing rather than saving. I started part of last year saving to buy a television but when trouble set in this year, I approached the local shopping mall and withdraw the amount, and closed the saving account. What they returned to me was a total of 35K, if I had even had this money on my M-Shwari account, at least a min of 100 Bob would have been the interest earned by withdrawal day given the tenure of my saving culture. My point here is rather than saving, invest however small rates, it’s better than having cash lying in some stash boxes for fear of using them. Investment is the key. What we need is to find the right place to invest and invest.

In my next article, I will tell you more about investments as part of personal finances but as I sign off please know that as you consider personal finances also add losses to the equation, question is, are you willing to allow for such variables?

© JMS2021