IT TAKES MORE THAN A’s

 “Go to school, get good grades and look for a good company that pays a good salary to work for”.

Simple and common as the advice is, it is very disastrous. It is what parents tell their children and children when grown tell their children too, on and on like that, creating a vast chain of ignorant generations of people.

It is the prevailing norm these days that a child should be enrolled into a nursery and primary school (as is the system in Nigeria), get promoted to a secondary school and finally finish from a university. Then the rat race begins. The child of yesterday, now a young man or woman gets employed in a company and starts to earn a fat salary with a company car to move around in. He (supposing the character in view is a male) rents a plush apartment in the “interesting” part of the city. He then buys his own car, meets a beautiful lady and they get married, move to a bigger apartment, have a child, buy a bigger car, more toys for the kid and more toys for themselves. As these happen, our young man decides to go back to school and earn a masters degree so he can earn more, so also does his wife. They return to work, earning more as expected and buying more adult toys for themselves. Gradually the children grow older and attend the best schools with their parents sweating it out at jobs they hate. They finish school, get a job and begin their own rat race.

This is just a mere description of what occurs in today’s world. People are not financially intelligent. They could be academic gurus with A’s all over their results and the highest C.G.P.A. in their faculties. They could even be PhD holders and professors but all those don’t matter. They don’t matter because money does not respect such kind of people. It takes more than A’s to acquire, manage and spend money. What then does it take to make money?

Making money and managing money has nothing to do with one’s certificate from a prestigious university. Certificates are dime a dozen. Some of the richest people today either never made it to the four walls of a university, or dropped out of one. School is a nice place to be, make friends, become a better person etc, but not a place for learning about money. You cannot become financially free and intelligent by going to the very best of schools. It goes beyond that. To make manage and make money requires one to be financially literate but not just to be literate but also to be intelligent. To become financially intelligent, you need to face the real world and acquire knowledge about how money works from real people, not from textbooks and lecturers. The worst kinds of persons to get financial advice from are your family and friends. To become financially intelligent, you need a team of people who have acquired experience in the field of finances and business. One of such people is a mentor. A mentor is a person that has done what you want to do and knows what mistakes are liable to be made. You also need to know the basics of personal finance like the differences between good debts and bad debts, assets and liabilities, balance sheet and financial statement. This does not mean you should be a genius in accounting, but that you should understand the simple basics of it.

When you go to the bank to say, borrow money, the banker will not ask you about your school report card or your C.G.P.A. He will ask for your real report card which is your financial statement. Every child should know how to write a financial statement and balance a balance sheet. But the truth of the matter is that only a few have access to such knowledge while the rest continue to struggle in meager lifestyles.