Assumptions can cost you, dearly!

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

Folks, assumption can dent your cash reserves and take money away from your pocket. Little wonder when doing chemistry in secondary school about forty years ago, assumptions were made with defined parameters.

You heard stuff like “temperature and pressure remaining constant,” when carrying out experiments or explaining one of those laws. It turned out that those scientists knew what they were talking about.

If you step outside of the laboratory and make assumptions in this digital and capitalist age without equally putting parameters in place as safeguards, your bank balance could be “gone with the wind.” The worst part of it is it doesn’t matter whether the undefined assumption is made during winter or summer, or whether it’s at a restaurant on Old Kent Road or a fanciful cafe in Knightsbridge. The harsh reality is that making assumptions can dip its long hand into your pocket and take more out of the cash you have there.

Even if you’re coming from a good cause on a very chilly and windy day, assumption can still cost you as l discovered after taking a hit in the pocket, recently. That was despite heading to another function from a book launch.

Prior to the evening of the first Saturday of this month, yours truly had not given much thought to the subject matter of assumption as it relates to personal finance. Thus, when the Bolt driver that was to ferry me to Hornchurch drove past the Palms Hotel, I wouldn’t have assumed he knew what he was doing.

But guess what? After about five minutes of driving past the hotel, he then pulled over inside a fuel station, saying: “We’re here”. Thinking it was a kind of stunt, yours truly said he had better be real. As it turned out, the driver said he was just following the direction of the sat nav and that was where the thing said I was going. On my side of the equation, I’d assumed he was going to take a back entrance to the hotel. Hence, I kept quiet when he drove past.

Of course, he offered to take me to the hotel, but that meant he had to go quite a distance before finding somewhere to make a U-turn and then begin the journey back. To be honest about it, yours truly thought he just did that out of the goodness of his heart.

l didn’t know my pocket was going to take a hit. It wasn’t till my eyes caught a glimpse of the update on my credit card statement later that same evening at the Christmas Party that the penny dropped. In fact, the additional charge that Bolt debited to my card was even more than the nearly nine quid that was initially taken for the journey from Romford.

Next time I’m inside a Bolt cab or elsewhere, I won’t be making any assumptions. And neither should you!

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