Don’t take your personal finance cue from US public finance

BY TUNDE OYEDOYIN

Tunde Oyedoyin is a personal finance coach and founder of UK-based  Money Intelligence Coaching Academy, a specialist academy of personal finance. He can be reached as follows: +447846089587

(WhatsApp only); E-mail: tu5oyed@gmail.com

Believe it or not, we’re creatures of copying. It’s just instinctive to want to imitate something or someone doing great and amazing things. Be it a Michael Jackson dance move or the way a Pentecostal preacher does his thing.

Perhaps this desire to copy is one of the reasons why even babies want to swap crawling with walking. They must have reasoned that if everyone around them isn’t going on all fours, why them? Sounds funny.

Watch this. Part of that natural craving to imitate something good is why many countries have copied the American Presidential system of government. They fancied it, because it’s a great system. But as an individual, don’t take your cue from how they run their public finance. Will come back to it shortly.

Copying is cool and isn’t going to be out of fashion as long as human beings don’t become extinct like the dinosaurs. Before the advent of information technology, Rank Xerox even had “we taught the world to copy” as their slogan. That itself is testament to the legitimacy of copying.

A few weeks ago, I think around the time of the Coronation of King Charles III, yours truly saw the clip of a UK-based Nigerian Afrobeats artiste who performed as if he was Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Boy oh boy, he had the swagger and actually looked the part of Baba 70. Even his back up singers made the cut. To be honest about it, one wouldn’t mind attending his gig when next he’s performing.

But as mentioned, inasmuch as we’re licensed to copy, don’t take your cue from the way the Americans run their public finance. Reason being that in recent years, they’ve always been overdrawn. President Joe Biden and the Republicans had a stand-off before the two sides could agree to a borrowing ceiling.

Tell you what? The biggest economy in the whole wide world was going to default and be grounded if they didn’t borrow money. He isn’t the first President to be in that situation and perhaps may not be the last. Barack Obama’s administration was in a similar situation.

Think about it. If you can’t put food on your family table unless you continue going overdrawn, perhaps your bank manager won’t be smiling at you. When next you pop inside the branch to ask them to increase your overdraft limit in order to pay your bills, you’ll probably be referred to a money management service.

Transferable skills shifted a teacher to boardroom

Most teachers are known to wait till getting to heaven before having a feel of their rewards. Bless their hearts. But a former teacher has bucked the trend by making the transition from the classroom to the boardroom of a major UK broadcaster.

Yours truly came across her story just over a week ago, while flipping through the June 4 edition of the Mail on Sunday. Tucked by the side of “Why the Square Mile has turned out the latest ITV drama (for now),” (p.84) is the piece on ITV boss, Dame Carolyn McCall.

According to the newspaper, “the highly respected 61-year-old businesswoman started as a teacher before moving into journalism.” She put in 24 years at The Guardian Media Group and then “worked her way up to be chief executive in 2006.” Before stepping up to become ITV boss in 2018, the mother of three moved to EasyJet in 2010. She is said to have earned three and a half million pounds at her current post in the boardroom of ITV last year.

Here’s the thing. Take the heat, while honing and developing your skills in whatever role you’re currently working. Those skills are yours forever and you should be able to land bigger and better openings where they can fetch you bigger bucks in the future.