Talking about money sense, I received a text message from a friend and the stark reality of the Nigerian problem hit me in such a way that I felt compelled to share it with you. The message reads thus:

“Enough is enough!

The U.S. President’s salary is $250,000 per annum and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the U.S. Economy is thirteen trillion dollars a year.

The allowance for a Nigerian Senator is $1,500,000. Even though our GDP is only $45 billion a year, the Senators are still clamoring for more! Our doctors, teachers, civil servants etc can’t boast of N1m a year and these guys want N30m every month”

Really, does this make sense? The message went further to advice that WE SAY NO TO THIS OPEN LOOTING OF NIGERIA ’S RESOURCES.

Now let’s begin to shout No! No!! No!!! No!!!! No!!!!!

Time to make a U_turn

This week let us begin to move from financial stress to financial success by beginning to act from a position of strength rather than sabotaging our financial lives with lies either to ourselves or to others. I would like you to go back over every step that brought you to this financial crisis and try to turn around every financial lie for good.

Starting with the Stock market

If you were a player in the stock market and you have lost a lot of money like many of us did, then I must tell you that it is time to wake up. The first thing to do is to let go the past and don’t allow it to define your today. A friend told me that her total portfolio worth more than N20m is now reduced to less than N6m with several bank debts hanging on her. Depressed and confused, she does not know what to do. My response to her was simple, “you cannot continue to hold onto your previous stock balances with the hope that by some miracle the prices of shares will suddenly shoot up and take you back to what you once had”. I added that the inability to accept the loss of anything you had is what keeps you from recognizing the gains that you could make and that the fear of loss for that matter is the cause of greater losses. The reality of the situation is that she has N6million today and not N20million so the wisest thing to do would be to make her plans around what she has now. Anything else would be mere foolishness. So to repeat the mistake we made by not recognizing when to let go as we watched our money drained out of the stocks and our balances reduced to its present level will be double tragedy. We must begin to focus on what we have now, rather than what we once had.