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
By way of disclosure, yours truly had a different title and had started putting it together. But I had to put that away after watching the first men’s semi-final at the Australian Open. Follow the drift.
Making the occasional mistakes and taking some hits are almost impossible to avoid in life. They often prevent us from achieving our goals.
Your personal finance is obviously not excluded. In fact, you’re most likely to stumble in this area a lot. One reason being that we make decisions about money almost the entire 52 weeks of the year. So, chances are that you made some mistakes last year and consequently suffered some losses. I also did, and took mine in my strides.
These mistakes could be anything from not putting away that monthly savings of ten thousand Naira or not listening to what your stock broker was trying to say in March. Perhaps, you may have even taken some hits because of bad advice and not checking out the things you heard from your brother or that barbershop expert friend.
Here’s the thing: If lessons are not learnt, the mistakes can become recurrent and they may result in taking more hits this year. The sad reality is that some folks don’t learn. However, some do take note of their hits and learn from their previous mistakes.
In fact, this piece was inspired by the revelation that Italian World tennis number four, Jannik Sinner, gave after ending Novak Djokovic’s reign at the Australian Open in the early hours of Friday, January 26th. Fielding questions from Jim Courier, at court side after dumbing out the Serbian top seed to reach his first ever Grand Slam final at the ripe young age of 22, he was asked how he achieved the almost impossible feat.
He said: “I learnt a lot” from last year’s Wimbledon semi final defeat that he suffered at the hand of the Serbian. Those lessons, according to him, brought an end to Djokovic’s dominance at Melbourne. For Sinner, that’s one step further in the direction of his own goals.
Like Sinner, take a look at whatever stopped you from achieving your financial goals in 2023.
So, what made you lose money on the stock market? Why did your bank turn down your request for that two hundred thousand Naira loan facility to expand your business? Squeeze out the lessons from any hits you took and start putting them to practise. Who knows, you may be ticking off the goal you couldn’t achieve last year before the end of the first quarter.
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