Money is not the key to all happiness, however, many people would believe, as I do, that the more money you have the easier it is for that key to be made. Why then are we seeing more and more people getting a lot of money and soon are back to their poor ways once the smith that made the key passes on?
For natural reasons, the world is still home to more poor people than rich people, poor people teaching their children poor ways through their value system by passage of each day.
Many people who have come of age, parents and grandparents alike, are not aware of the link between their values and daily choices, and more importantly, how these affect the quality of the soft wear generating and guiding the choices of their generations. Children learn anything and everything from the environment of parenting in the first two stages of brain development. Wealthy or poor ways are choices young children learn subconsciously.
Kenya is home to digital money, thanks to those brave two individuals who “discovered” how to distribute airtime electronically between them. We have come to accept ‘airtime’ as money.
This mysterious solution is also the reason many scams have emerged. It has not been understood universally, and that has enabled people with just a little better understanding of the same to generate schemes that have caused many get-rich-quick people make equally very quick losses.
Our financial landscape in 2021 had its fair share of people loosing large amounts of money to scams. As I noted above, if you don’t know how to make money through logical investment or industrial pursuits as a way of life, you will very easily gamble it away back to its true owners through scams. People raised in homes where money is made by pursuit of logical processes also learn to know the differences between a good business and investment opportunities from “deals.”
Then there are those who did not lose money but bought land in the hope that one day the value of their land will rise. It could have been any other asset not just land, but in hope as opposed to knowledge.
The “key smith” lessons for the keys to wealth are first, and best acquired at home where learning is paced and natural. Investment is the result of knowledge and thereafter skills acquired over passage of time.
You can learn how to invest in just about any asset. After acquiring the information, you must proceed to put it to experience (create knowledge) and repeat the application of the same over time (acquire skills). You soon begin to understand how the information about the asset is useful in assessing its value over time. These patterns become the source of the sixth sense (insight) that you use to determine whether you should keep hold of an asset (good prospects) or offload and move on. Every market has a fair share of its ignorant buyers.
If you belong to the long list investors who purchased assets on the pure hope that it will grow in value without knowing the information that will drive its growth, I invite you to seek information in 2022.
Apply it to acquire knowledge and repeat the application of the same until you become a skilled investor. You are an investor when you know how to combine information affecting the value of the asset and time to make more from the asset.
Finally, remember that savings will never make you rich. Money loses purchasing power when kept as cash. It is always easier to borrow a million when you have built a good credit report than a person keeping a million in the bank.
In the past year, many young people destroyed their credit worthiness by borrowing to consume and then failing to pay back. That is bad credit report.
We are living in a digital world where things move swiftly and choices produce results almost instantly, unlike in the days of Henry Ford, when industrialists took ages to become wealthy from a series of industrial undertakings that picked up market slowly. Financial mistakes move even faster in this generation.
Patrick Wameyo is a financial literacy coach at Financial Academy and Technologies, and an entrepreneurship coach at The Entrepreneurship Center EA. [email protected] .
