#HowISpendMyMoney: Money and Wealth are synonymous but not the same

#HowISpendMyMoney: Money begets money. Investments are possible pools for mining recurring cash. Money and wealth are synonymous and not necessarily. However, our choices concerning money can create a bridge to wealth creation if diligently explored. This articles tends to ask a crucial question; How do you spend your money?

Money doesn’t make you wealthy; money lays the foundation of wealth creation but doesn’t entirely make you rich.

In other words, money is a pathway to wealth but money isn’t wealth.

Wealth comes with the number, nature and type of investments.

Also, owning great assets such as a mind-blowing and eye-popping automobile or multi-million naira gadgets is not a determinant of how rich you are, that’s if you are at all.

On the long run #HowISpendMyMoney determines how wealthy I will become.

Invariably, you can own a fancy car yet be as poor as a church rat. What that means is that assets such as cars, smart phones and laptops, the latest gadgets to mention but a few, create that false feeling of opulence; an illusion of wealth; a façade of what it means to be wealthy but in the real sense of it, you can still turn out a pauper.

To put it rather mildly, fancy cars, smart phones and other supposed assets are actually liabilities and are in no way investments. Little wonder a mechanized farmer who resides in Ijebu ode and goes to his expansive farmland on a bike can possibly be wealthier than a top executive of a new generation bank in Abuja, or a young school leaver who sells fried yam and akara in a strategic area of Lagos state happens to have more savings than a mid-level officer with a Bachelor’s degree.

Your fancy car depreciates over time and mileage and you end up spending more money maintaining such asset. So does having lots of money stored up in the bank doesn’t make your savings an investment.

While it’s good to have cash in hand to guard against unforeseen circumstances that will result to you shelling out wads of cash, it is also unwise to leave your entire savings at the mercy of your accountants.

Truth be told, paper money depreciates especially our naira notes. The Government of any nation can decide to print new currencies at any point in time. It’s even worse when the government of the day suddenly wakes up one morning to print new currencies of ridiculous denominations.

In such instances, the more currency any government prints the less valuable that currency becomes.

Prices of goods and commodities increase in the market not because they increase in value but as a result of inflation, and automatically money loses value.

So, imagine you save money in the bank to get a gadget at a time ‘t’ and three months later the price of the gadget has increased by a whopping 50%. What that means is that your savings has lost value by 50%.

That is what inflation does, that is what putting all your hopes in liquid cash amounts to. One of the ways supposedly rich people go broke!

Take a look at this scenario; a certain landlord increases the rent of a civil servant whose salary has just been halved due to the economic recession that continues to plague his country. What do you think happened here? Did the landlord’s property suddenly appreciate or was it our naira that lost value? Your answer sums it up.

Suffice it to say that millionaires spend their money on investments and not just on assets. If I must have that mouth-watering asset, then I already have worthy investments.

People don’t just become broke because an entire country went on recession or they were never destined to be rich. People become broke because they misplace priorities and spend money in a way that dissuades the legal tender from making future transits into their coffers.

Does that then mean you can never go broke when you know how money wants it to be spent? How would you rather spend your money? When you hit that once in a lifetime jackpot, what is the first thing that will come to mind?

Would you rather go on a vacation to that end of the world that you have only visited in your endless daydreams or would you break the banks to get that latest gadget or newly built car?

How about just spending your hard earned money on clothes and accessories…yes! and food too, after all we only die once!

Remember, people become broke not because their village people want it that way…

Rather the choices we make with money determines how wealthy we would become

Have your say…