This post needs no introduction because we are all familiar with the “I have nothing to wear” syndrome. This syndrome strikes as you are exiting the shower in the morning, and are trying to make a decision on what to wear for the day. From experience, it is more likely to strike on Wednesday or Thursday, in line with the build-up of work-week fatigue. I…
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This post is the third of a four-post series about tracking our expenses, courtesy of the #MaishaNiMPesaTu promotion. Read the introduction to the series, where I make a big confession, and the second post sharing my reflections after a week of closely tracking my expenses here. There is no doubt that tracking your expenses is one of the most important tenets of good personal financial…
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Earlier this week, I announced that I was going to be publicly tracking my expenses for the next one month. A few days in, and I would like to share what it has been like. The daily expense tracking was no big deal at all. It’s about logging what I spend, and I did it pretty mindlessly on an Excel sheet (which I am yet…
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Whenever I speak publicly about personal finance as I did recently at the Sanlam Annual Conference, people approach me thereafter and praise both the talk and my apparently great money management skills: “Wow! You must be great at saving money” “Are you trained in finance?” I am “This is why you are great at personal finance!” Here is the surprise though. I am not great…
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In the last few months, regulators have raised alarm over the proliferation of mobile loans. According to Transunion, Credit Reference Bureau (CRB), at least 500,000 Kenyans have been blacklisted, mostly for defaulting on mobile loans. We currently have over 50 mobile lenders (including banks such as Barclays, Equity, and KCB that have launched their mobile lending apps), and it seems Kenyans are borrowing multiple times…
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If you have been reading this blog for some time, you know that I love farming. This morning before I sat down to write this post, I delivered 40kgs of onions to a client. Onions grown and harvested from my Meru farm, thanks to the help and labour of my parents. This is an ongoing story of my farming adventures which have often been tragically…
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A while back, I shared how I managed to negotiate interest-free installments for my insurance premiums with the insurance company and also got a discount. I have since changed insurance companies and when I moved, I asked again, and they said yes. Businesses that are sensitive to customer needs will tend to be responsive to the things that matter to their customers. This is why…
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In 2012, I wrote about why I do not have, and had no plans not get home internet. It simply did not make sense then, both financially and practically. That has since changed. For the last two years, I have had a fibre connection to my house. So what caused me to change my mind? First, fibre internet got cheaper. When I wrote that article,…
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For a long time, using M-Pesa on your phone was not a pleasant experience. If you had a feature phone, you had to access the M-Pesa menu, then navigate it using a USSD menu. Some smartphone users (especially iPhones) had to dig deep into their phones, to even find this SIM Toolkit menu. As if that was not hard enough, you then had to be…
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“No wonder Nairobi people do not invest much. There are too many things for you to spend money on” This is my mother’s favorite remark, whenever she visits for an extended time and gets to see the things we spend money on. In this particular instance, I had just paid entry fees for a play park, for her granddaughter to have some fun. I was…
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