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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After months of waiting, Treasury has finally launched M-Akiba, a simple way to buy government bonds using mobile money. This is fantastic news especially for those of us who: Are millennials with no inclination for bureaucracy. The traditional process of buying government instruments involves a lengthy and tiring account opening process at the Central Bank. A few years ago, I went through the process with an…
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Someone once said that a sure way to know you are in a Kenyan’s kitchen, is the sight of the polythene bag that contains other polythene bags. This iconic polythene bag will usually be located in a cupboard under the sink. This peculiar characteristic will soon be a relic of history, if the ban on domestic use polythene bags is implemented in line with the Gazette Notice…
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Most people know M-Shwari for that quick loan when you are in a fix, but did you know that M-Shwari is also a savings account? How M-Shwari Savings Account Works M-Shwari similar to a bank savings account linked to your M-Pesa wallet. A good way of envisioning this is to think of your bank current account (that you use for transactions), coming with a free…
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A friend recently wrote to me to ask me for advice on whether he should buy a house off-plan, with the intention of selling it once the development is complete. With his permission, I publish the advice I gave to him below. Off-plan house sales (also called pre-sales) are where the developing company sells some units in advance, and uses the money raised from these…
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The brochure is very compelling. It tells you that whatever your financial goal, an “insurance-investment” plan can help you accomplish it from as little as KShs 2,500 per month. This is a brochure for a typical insurance savings plan, whether it is for education, or general savings. They state that the insurance plan is linked to a fund that invests at the stock market (equity…
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The other day, I asked some questions on Twitter and it elicited an interesting conversation on the timeline but also in my DMs In Kenya, it is common for parents to expect parental support from their children. The logic as aptly expressed by a leading economist David Ndii is that a child is the best pension plan – it visits, brings grandchildren etc, unlike just…
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One of the key lessons from the January spending fast failures was that we were too ambitious to start out with a total fast. I now realise that a spending diet is a more sensible way to start off. A spending diet works the same way a food diet works. When doing a food diet, you set a goal you want to achieve (weight loss to x kgs,…
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At the beginning of the month, a couple of us committed to a 31 day spending fast from the 1st of the 31st of January 2017. The aim was to reduce on our impulse spending, use up everything we had in stock, and generally purge for the new year. You can read the rules here. About 65 of us even formed a Telegram group where…
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