We all have had seasons when our money runs out before the next paycheck. One of my readers asked how she could get out of the cycle of always using current month’s paycheck to pay for last month’s bills. Speaking from experience, this can be very demoralizing, especially if you’re hoping to be financially free some day. For the longest time, I had this problem, but…
Read MoreEveryone agrees that to take control of your finances, you must master the 3 budgeting steps as shown below. While I have written extensively about expense tracking and budgeting here, I haven’t given much practical advice on how to make sure you follow your budget once you have it in hand. This post is simplifies the third step; Executing. What is the envelope method? The…
Read MoreThe first rule for financial success is spend less than you earn. The last post was on the first part of the rule (spend less), and we looked at five simple ways to ensure you are spending less. This post points to the other part of the equation:increasing your earnings. Increasing your earnings gives you more money to pay off your debts, save for things you want to…
Read MoreOn the last post, we introduced the first rule for financial success, and I promised to write about basic ways we can adhere to this rule. Spending less than you earn often means that you need to reduce the money you spend (it’s not rocket science really). To start with, this doesn’t have to be anything drastic, extreme money saving tips should come after you…
Read MoreWhat is the first and most important rule if you want to succeed financially? Spend less than you earn. Sounds simple, like something we all do, but really is it? If we all spent less than we earned, then Barclays credit card agents wouldn’t be so busy calling people to tell them about their exciting new products. I got the second call from them on…
Read MoreQuick: If I gave you Kshs 200,000 today, what would you do with it? Every so often, or at least once in a lifetime, we receive money we didn’t expect. It may be from a lottery winning (very rarely), your employer could feel generous and decide to reward you, or you could close a business deal and get more profits than anticipated. Windfalls may be…
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This is a guest post by Amaan-Ali Fazal, a BASC Mechanical Engineering (Thermofluids) student. Many thanks to Private Naph for getting Amaan to blog for us. Naph is a motor enthusiast and runs the best car blog in Africa (in my opinion). You can learn more about his blog here and follow him on Twitter. If you want to guest post on this blog, check…
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Any investment adviser worth his salt will tell you to include stocks in your investment strategy, but few tell you how to do it. I strongly believe that stocks are great, and should be part of everyone’s long term investment strategy, but I haven’t focused much on them in the past. However, after observing the trends in the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE), then reading this…
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My monthly budgeting model is such that instead of planning for every single item I intend to buy, I set aside the following (in order of importance): Savings and Giving Rent Debts (if any) Other bills (fuel, electricity etc) House shopping Whatever remains after that is my “Float” or spending money. When it runs out, I stop spending. For that reason, I rarely track the…
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We are introducing a new section on the blog, Jargon Friday, to appear every Friday (rather obvious isn’ t it?). Jargon Friday aims to simplify some finance and tax terms, and make it easier for a non finance reader to understand our posts, and even more, manage their finances better. In this edition of Jargon Friday, we look at the term: Loan Interest. Definition: Interest is…
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