Activate your financial goals with 5 key ingredients

TUNDE OYEDOYIN  

Tunde Oyedoyin is a London-based personal finance coach and founder of Money Intelligence Coaching Academy, a specialist academy of personal finance. He can be reached as follows: +447846089587 (WhatsApp only); E-mail: tu5oyed@gmail.com

Has anyone ever approached you and said they needed financial help this year? Or have you even called your better-off friends and said you needed financial help? Follow the drift.

Congratulations, if you’ve taken action by hitting the reset button after last week’s piece. If for any reasons you haven’t scribbled down your financial goals for the year, make sure you lay down that marker as soon as you’re through reading this particular article.

Having set our financial goals, the next step is to take another glance at them and make sure they have the commonly known five criteria: SMART. Folks, this is not a cliche, if your financial goals are not: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic (or Relevant) and Time-bound, they’re not then worth the paper on which you’ve pencilled them.

A YouTuber I follow said something in an old video of hers I watched last week. She was on the money when she said “be specific with what you want in 2025. If that’s the only thing you take away from this piece, you would have earned your stripes.

Little wonder then that during conversations or meetings, you hear one party telling the other, “don’t beat about the bush.” That saying is evergreen and is as relevant today as it’s going to be tomorrow. As a matter of fact, it seems it’s very much applicable to anyone heading somewhere. Assuming in the examples used in the opening, the person who approached you kept saying “I just need help every month”. Well, you’ll probably have to figure out how much they want from you every month.

But if someone else asks you to help them with five thousand naira each month to buy data, you’re more likely to know how to respond to the specific request.

Not surprisingly, when Zenith Bank, in line with last year’s directive from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), that banks should beef up their war chest, went to the market to shop for the additional capital needed, the five ingredients mentioned above featured in their public offer listing. Yours truly will actually flip things around and use their listing as the backdrop for this piece.

Firstly, by coming to raise capital in the stock market through a public offer, that was evident of the financial goals they set for themselves as an organisation. If we go further to unpack it, you’ll discover the amount they had to raise was measurable. They didn’t just send out a vague prospectus. Thirdly, they’d figured out that they could achieve the goal. Hence, they made the offer public.

Was their listing realistic or relevant? You bet it was. Not only did they know they were being realistic with the amount they had to raise, the listing was relevant in order to beef up their capital base in line with the CBN’s order. It was also relevant in that they wanted to remain in business. Lastly, the offer was on the table for a specific time. Anybody wanting a slice of the cake then would have jumped in. Yours truly even did a pro bono — free promo — for them during the period. It was to let readers have a bit of the action.

Therefore, take a look at the financial goals you’ve set and put time markers on them. Be specific as well. If you want to increase your savings, be specific with the amount you intend on putting away.

In closing, an email of an offer of a new development in Lagos landed in my inbox last week. The monthly payment is over a quarter of a million naira. Not realistic for me. So, yours truly won’t be ringing them for reservations.

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