How Women Can Make Smarter Financial Decisions

This guest post was written by Eloho Onwah. She is one of the most awesome people I know. She works as an investment manager in Lagos.

Here's her advice to young women just starting out professionally on how to secure their financial future and make smarter decisions with their money:

Photo Credit: kenteegardin via Compfight cc

One day, you are a young professional woman beginning your first job with the promise of your first pay check, next day you are ten years into same with the realization that you are living from paycheck to paycheck. How do we pivot and change this course?

What I Would Do If I Had N100 Million

I stumbled upon an article on a financial intelligence blog, Smart Money Africa, that I found very interesting. In it, she talked about what she would do if she won a 100 million Naira lottery. The article contained a lot of investment language that I did not understand very well but I really liked the idea behind it. The author (who's named Arese) highlighted the following things that she would do:

EASY WAYS TO RUN YOUR BUSINESS INTO THE GROUND

These are simple steps on how to kill your business quickly. If you’re wise, you’ll learn from them and do the opposite:

• Treat your customers like crap. This is the fastest way to kill any business, no matter how big it may be. Some businesses are dead even before they start because they refuse to acknowledge their customers. They forget that the customer is the boss and that he can fire you and substitute your business with another person’s. 
• Improper planning, preparation and consideration before taking action. Many business owners just jump into certain decisions that end up being the death sentence of their business. 

"FOR THE WISDOM OF MONEY…"

One of the most enlightening books I have ever read is “the richest man in Babylon” by George S. Clason. Never have I until that time being interested about the wonderful things you can do with money and that money can do for you if you know how to deal wisely with your ‘gold’.

For so many, money has become their master; their ultimate goal in life is to make more and more money. However, reading the book has changed my perspective. I now know that while the poor work to make money, the rich make money work for them.

Wealth is not in the amount of money you possess; wealth is in your ability to create it at will, over and over again. For me, the wisdom of wealth is more beneficial than having wealth alone. It is better that a man be equipped with the wisdom of money than for him to possess large estates and know not how to tame his money.

Ideally, you can’t truly know the value of wealth until you have work for it, in sweat and in blood. Wealth is not in winning lotteries, that is luck and ‘lucky’ wealth will not last. Only a man with the wisdom of money can turn ten thousand naira into an estate of inestimable value. People with ‘lucky’ money usually end up wasting it because they have very little or no value at all for money. The wisdom of money includes one’s ability to invest his money and reap profitably.

Better a wise man with little money than a fool with an estate of doom. Take heed, for the wisdom of money supersedes its possession.