A Personal Finance Seminar Will Not Fix Your Finances

Attending a personal finance seminar can be very exciting and enlightening. Most seminars these days have a couple of financially succesful speakers who have done great things with their lives and have a significant amount of wealth. These people are said to have “made it”, and we attend these seminars to hear their secrets to wealth or financial independence.  These seminars are very exciting because they make it seem so easy! Instead of buying an iPhone, make a down payment on a house! Buy a plot and build a home. My billions are as a result of saving 10% of my income. Be disciplined. Have less fun. Marry early. The solutions come in short, twitter friendly sentences, and they leave us feeling pumped and excited. We can be rich too!

Then we get home, and do nothing until the next seminar where we get pumped once more.

Why don’t personal finance seminars make a difference in our lives?

Well, this is for several reasons. First, financial independence and wealth accumulation is not easy, that is why few people achieve it. It takes discipline, habit building, and for most, a good dose of luck. The billionaire speaking at the seminar may (or may not) have made his billions honestly, but he also had a lot going for him. May be he started a business that the market needed at that exact time. Malcom Gladwell in the book Outliers talks about this.

Secondly, this field is called personal finance because it is personal! How we manage money is a product of many things; our background, attitude about money, the things we value about life, the amount of money we have at our disposal and so on and so forth. Your strategy may not work for me, so listening to someone share their strategy may be good and exciting, but it has an almost zero practical application unless your life circumstances and desires are exactly the same. A guru might tell you to buy a home instead of an iPhone, but what if you want to travel the world instead, or if you like gadgets? How does this advice fit in with you? Instead of listening to other people’s strategies, I usually advice people to sit down with a financial adviser who will guide them based on what they desire in life. The aim really is to live the life you desire, and to be comfortable in old age. An adviser will tell you how to do this.

The final reason why these seminars do not work is we have all the information that we need to manage our money. The gap between information and impact lies in the habits we have formed over time. Listening to a seminar does not help you build key habits you need (neither does reading blog posts by the way).  If you want to be successful at managing money, you have to build the necessary habits, which are expense tracking, budgeting, paying yourself first, delaying gratification etc.  It often takes a lifetime to build these habits.

So next time you hear of a personal finance seminar, give it a miss and buy a notebook instead where you will work on your life plan. Miss the after-seminar drinks with friends, and spend that Shs 2,000 on an hour with a personal finance adviser. Get an accountability partner. These will have  a greater impact on your finances I promise.

Would you like to receive exclusive content about personal finance and business management? Sign up for my newsletter for a once-a-month email shot. No spam I promise.