Online shopping was created for people like me, who like nice things at a good price, but also hate window shopping and haggling. I love that from the comfort of my office desk, I can get my body butter, duvets, shoes, even lingerie, just by sending an instant message to order, and an M Pesa text. While I have had many positive experiences buying things…
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Early this year, when Kenya Bankers Association (KBA) announced Pesalink, a bank-bank instant money transfer service that was to be the “M-Pesa killer” , I was very excited. Their statement that Pesalink was going to be a super cheap way of transferring money was music to my ears, seeing as I enjoy saving money, and as I have blogged here before, the cost of mobile…
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How do you pay your monthly bills to service providers? For me bill payments are a multi-step, very painful process. Let us say I want to pay my internet access bill to Zuku. This is what happens to me every month. It starts with a reminder text from Zuku, at the most inopportune time, for example on a Tuesday at 10 am, while I am in…
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This post is a third on a series about how to save for our kids’ education. The first post looked at a savings account as a tool for accumulating savings and the second evaluated education insurance plans. There is consensus that when saving for the future, you should prioritize your retirement over your kids’ higher education. Why? While there are many programs that help students fund…
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Yesterday, The Time published an article that cited the love for avocado as one of the things making home ownership an impossible goal for millennials. They were quoting Tim Gurner, an Australian millionaire and property mogul. “When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” Gurner told the Australian news show 60 Minutes….
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Yesterday was Mothers’ Day, and as I was reflecting on my relationship with my mother, I was reminded of a small thing that mom did for us, that probably shaped how we view money in adulthood. Like most Kenyan children of our time, our parents sent us to boarding school. A key feature in a boarding school child’s life was when you did “back to school”…
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Rock bottom financially is a position that some of us are familiar with. This is where things fail to work as planned, and you find yourself in mountains of debt, and not enough cash flow to both pay off the debts and your living expenses. The tendency for most people is to black it all out and hope it goes away. However, it does not…
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Yesterday, the popular sport betting company Sportpesa announced that they had a winner for their Kshs 221 million jackpot. With great pomp and color, Samuel Abisai, the winner was unveiled this morning. As expected, social media has been abuzz with the things one would do if they won that much money. This was my favorite; the state of our economy. Buy milk for a whole…
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This morning, I was at a meeting with a friend who had been a Chase Bank client for years, till the bank went into receivership last year. 4 days ago, the Central Bank of Kenya announced that Chase Bank’s receivership had been extended for a further 6 months to September, in a bid to find a buyer for the bank. Shortly after its collapse last…
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Last week, the dilemma above crossed my Twitter timeline. The gentleman is disillusioned about his wife of 3 years, after finding out that she took all their savings (mostly his) and used them to pay off her student debt without informing him. From the post, he had been saving for some time to buy a house. I want to assume that he had told her…
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