Today’s post is by Owuor Kuyoh, an investment analyst at a local investment bank. He loves to use numbers to tell a story but in this instance he decided to add some words to the numbers. I was about 15 years old, desperately saving to buy a new PlayStation2 when my father told me “Money doesn’t grow on trees! You have to put it to work,…
Read MoreAs I’ve written before, I have had a couple of tries at farming, and I am at it once more. Each time I return to farming with a new strategy on how to succeed at it, strategies that are borrowed from the business world where I usually am at when I am not at the farm. This time round, my big 3 word strategy when I…
Read MoreToday we are talking about cars once more. In previous posts, I have discouraged taking a loan to buy a car because as we all know that a car is not an asset. It loses value as soon as you drive it and keeps losing value after that. However, a car is often a necessity and circumstances can force us to borrow to buy a…
Read MoreThis question arises when you have some extra income that you could use to increase your monthly debt repayments, or when you get lump sum income and are considering using it all to repay the loans you have. There are many schools of thought about debt; some people believe debt should be avoided totally. They believe that you should buy only what you can afford to…
Read MoreWhen a person shares their life story, it is supposed to serve a dual purpose: to inspire other people to achieve what the person has achieved, or to educate the audience. Learning from the experiences of others is said to be the cheapest way to learn. That said, the internet age makes it incredibly difficult to learn from others’ experience. See we have been brought up…
Read MoreWhenever I hold a conversation with a group of techies, the issue of Kenyan corporations stealing ideas from young techies comes up for discussion. We all know how it happens; you come up with an idea that is useful to a big corporation, say a mobile banking platform for a bank, or a payment platform for a mobile service operator. You spend some time building…
Read MoreMr Kamau: Woow! What a beautiful flat you have built Mrs Otieno. Retirement is certainly going well for you. Share the secret. (Kenyans love to know the secret to wealth and success) Mrs Otieno: (smiling) There is no secret Kamau. I started saving with National Social Security Fund (NSSF) when I first got employed at 22 years old, and last year when I retired, they paid me…
Read MoreI have started a farming column on this blog, because in addition to being a Rookie Manager, I am also a Rookie Farmer. Let us share the lessons and our thoughts as we make Kenya food secure. Armed with the lessons learned from my previous attempts at farming, a spreadsheet of financial projections and many screenshots of Farming Kenya discussions, I decided to start farming…
Read MoreThe other day, I attended a training forum where the speaker said something that stuck with me. He said that a good majority of us (more than 90%) will die having taken more out of this earth than we will have added. This is something that requires deeper thought in the context of our relationships, our ecosystems and the way we work, but today I…
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