Set financial goals for the second half of the year

BY 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

If, as they often say in government and Westminster corridors in particular, twenty four hours is a long time in politics, then six months isn’t a short time when it comes to your personal finance matters.

So, as we navigate the opening weeks of this second half of the year, you need to set financial goals. Otherwise, another Christmas will come by before you even blink or say Jack Robinson.

In other words, irrespective of what may have happened with your half-year results, you still must embrace the challenge of producing better results in this second half. One way to achieve this is to set financial goals. They may be those from the beginning of the year or entirely new goals. What matters is that you have some.

Watch this. Your financial goals do not have to be earth shaking as wanting to acquire a minority stake in a barbing saloon down the road. It may be as basic and realistic as wanting to put just ten thousand Naira aside or a tenner – £10- under your pillow every month. Both are worthwhile goals and you’ll be surprised that not many people have saved ten thousand Naira or a tenner per month from January to June.

More than five years ago, yours truly was holding a free Money Intelligence seminar at Walthamstow Library and talking along this line. A young mother in the audience said if only she heard what one was talking about before, things would have been different for her.

So, in the words of Shawn Wallace of ITV’s hit programme, ‘The Chase’, “let’s do this” and set financial goals for the second half of this year.

Don’t forget. Yours may simply be that you want to be less reliant on overdraft each and every month. For someone else, they may fancy saving thirty thousand Naira per month over the next six months. That should help make your landlord happy at some point when 2024 comes around.

Know your level and set realistic goals. Yours truly read a piece in the Metro Newspaper of Wednesday July 5 and it was that the Coutts Bank had closed the account of former Brexit party leader, Nigel Farage.

According to the report, it wasn’t anything personal or political as Farage claimed. The private bank’s source told BBC it was purely a commercial decision, as customers must borrow or invest at least £1 million with them or hold £3 million in savings. That means anyone who doesn’t meet either condition should move their money next door.

Though it’s a good feeling walking across Trafalgar Square and pointing to Coutts as the place you keep your money; that actually may be among someone’s half-year goals. Tell you what? Rather than have that, it is better to set realistic goals such as saving N10,000 per month for the rest of the year. It’s good to know your level.

N:B Correction on last week’s piece on Adieu Jerry Okorodudu. It turned out that one had mistakenly forgotten to put “t” somewhere in the penultimate paragraph. The sentence was supposed to be “Hopefully, the Ikorodu hospital will be kind enough to let go of his dead body even if the family can’t settle the bill.”

Many thanks to the distinguished retired banker friend of this column who brought it to one’s attention.

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