Winning the money game

Money is a game with rules and you can win or lose. You need to know how to make money, manage the money you have made and pass it on. Our goal is not to make money, though that seems to be the focus of most people. Money is just a tool to enable you to do whatever it is you want to do and enhances your enjoyment of life and relationships. A newly married lady friend told me a while back smiling cheek to cheek that money is the lubricant of love. It makes love very sweet. However, if you don’t know how to manage the money that is already coming to you, you will end up like dry ground that shows no sign it rained hours earlier.

There is no argument about the fact that we are where we are today because we mismanaged our recent boom. The culture of conspicuous consumption placed us in a situation whereby a sharp decrease in our primary source of income triggered a recession. Saving and investing in assets is not yet in our DNA.

Is your focus on production or consumption?

The crux of the matter is who we really are on the inside. If that does not change, nothing we do will be sustainable. Most of the questions I receive revolve around what to do. ‘How to’ books sell more than books on changing our paradigms – the way we see things. You have to BECOME before you can DO on a sustainable basis in order to HAVE (BE – DO – HAVE). If you bypass being and rush straight to doing, it will not last because who you are will sabotage what you are trying to do. Many have not been able to save, not for lack of trying, but because they go back and consume that which has been saved. Who they are is not support the habit they are trying to form.

Change has to start from the inside. If you do not change, nothing changes (as explained above). If circumstances change, things may look okay for a while, until circumstances change again. Nigerians all of a sudden have become very prudent with their resources. Parents are looking for more affordable options. It is dawning on us that we consume more than we produce, hence the unhealthy dependence on foreign exchange from the Central Bank. Our lifestyle is powered by petrodollars. What happens when the economy improves, the naira springs back and forex is no longer an issue? Will we remain prudent or go back to our old ways? That is the acid test as to whether the change was internal or external.

If you are a hunter at the core, your focus will be on earning to spend rather than growing your wealth. Savings becomes an afterthought, something that happens when there are leftovers. Many complain that there is nothing left over to save. That is true because savings are taken off the bottom, not the top. If you are prudent, instead of using all your money to buy a Range Rover, you go for a much cheaper car, save and invest the rest. You make it a habit to spend less than you earn. If what you want to do takes all your money, you cannot afford it. If you put all your money on display, you are essentially displaying your foolishness.

Moving from hunting to farming

A hunter cannot win the game of money until he experiences a paradigm shift from a hunting mentality to a farming mentality, from consumption to production.

This shift does not happen overnight. It takes a while to unlearn bad habits and learn good ones. Many of us were brought up by parents who were hunters. They went to school to get a qualification so as to get a job and earn a salary to live on. That is all they did – spend their salary. Their lives revolved around their salary. It determined what they could and could not do. After the salary, their hope was on pensions and financial assistance from their children. Some mothers-in-law’s grouse with their daughter-in-law is the suspicion that their daughter-in-law is hindering her son from sending money home. To many parents, their children doing better than them means having more degrees and better jobs. Investing is not something that was discussed at the dinner table or at home. The salary was king. The bigger, the better.

With such a background, you need a lot of deprogramming to see a different reality. One powerful method of deprogramming is constant reading, putting into practice what you read, and relating with people already living in a different reality.

If you stay in one place for too long, you begin to think that is the only reality. If you tie a chicken to a tree for 3 weeks, it becomes domesticated to that environment, long after you have removed the rope. It takes pursuing that chicken far away from that environment such that it cannot find its way home, for it to explore a new environment or reality.

The game of money is won and lost in the mind. If you have a closed mind backed by excuses to justify your status quo, you will keep going around in circles, going up and down according to the direction of the economy. The most important journey you can make when it comes to managing your money is moving from hunting to farming. When you start to see differently, the show starts to fall into place. When what comes into your hands begins to increase (rather than disappear), you are well on your way to winning the money game.