Where are you with your financial goals?

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

As already mentioned in previous pieces, it makes plenty of sense to regularly check where you’re heading and what ground you’ve covered in your personal finance journey. Thus, in our context, it’s important to know where you are with your financial goals.

It’s like checking out the rice or yam you’re cooking. Except if you’ve put the timer on, you can’t leave the rice or yam on the cooker and not pop inside the kitchen to see where things are with what you’ve put on the fire. Imagine discovering you didn’t even turn the fire on. Sadly for some folks, they don’t turn on the fire of their financial goals.

That’s why the second piece of this year was that “Your financial goals must be SMART”. You may want to give it a quick glance. For example, if two of the five that you set in January were that you wanted to go on a weekend vacation to Jos in June or wherever. If, secondly, it was to also pay for a masters degree programme to give you some mileage with your civil service or teaching career, why not check where you are with that list of five?

Tell you what? Two things happened at Willesden Junction on my way to work on Thursday and Friday of last week that lent credence to the fact that knowing where we are on a particular journey matters.

Not only does knowing it determine how we move and behave on that journey, it should actually motivate us to either big ourselves up or get us to put the spring under our feet. Moreover, knowing where you are is a gauge in determining what you need to do, if you realise you need to cover as much ground as possible within a specified time like this year.

As for the events mentioned, the first was when I knew I had about five minutes to move from one platform to the other after exiting the train that I came off. Yours truly was even stepping aside and allowing those rushing to either of two other platforms do their thing on Thursday morning. I’d figured out that I could make it to my desired platform ahead of the connecting train heading to Clapham Junction.

But hear this. After coming to the train that I got off at the same Willesden Junction on Friday, I had only two minutes to make it to my desired platform in order to get on the Clapham Junction train I was targeting. Like some other commuters, yours truly had to activate the rushing mode and meander his way through a number of bodies so as to make the target.

The difference in one’s behaviour on both days and with the same destination in mind was that, as already pointed out, on Thursday, I had more time to hit the target than on Friday. Thus, it’s not a bad idea knowing you’ve not reduced your level of indebtedness for that business loan you took three years ago. Knowing you’ve not paid it down as much as you planned by this time of the year is not the end of the story. That could be a motivation for not taking as much vacation at the end of the year. So, take the time to check out where exactly you are with those financial goals of yours and then start responding appropriately.

Why the rich get richer, the poor, poorer

Ever wondered why many generations of the rich keep stashing up and transferring wealth to their children and the poor keep handing over the baton of poverty down the line?

A piece in the UK Sun newspaper of Saturday, November 9, seems to give one clue. According to the report: “TV Kirstie to inherit £1.5m in dad’s will,” (p.17), the presenter of “Location, Location”, Kirstie Allsopp is “set to inherit £1.5million following the death of her father,” Lord Charles Hindlip. She and her three siblings were left an estate of over six million quid by their late father. Each gets at least £1 million.

Many children don’t get to inherit anything when their parents pass on. Imagine what is possible even if you turn 70 before inheriting a million naira from your parent’s estate.

business a.m. commits to publishing a diversity of views, opinions and comments. It, therefore, welcomes your reaction to this and any of our articles via email: comment@businessamlive.com