Managing Your Money, Making it Do More – Pay for Your Future Priorities, Today not Tomorrow

By Hadassah-Esther Osimen

Your priorities are very important. They are the things that matter to you in life. The things that you want to achieve, what to be remembered for, want to enjoy, etc. Your priorities are not someone else’s priorities. They are your purpose, your make or breaks,  they define your idea of success,  they make you feel happy and give you much more than a feel good feeling. Your priorities are very important factors that enable you know that you have or are living a good life. Let’s illustrate this with an example: Your dreams, , what are they? Where do you see yourself in Two, Five, Ten years? After you have reached your set goals, where else do you want to go? What kind of lifestyle do you desire now, everyday and as you make your way forward? All of these are elements towards your priorities. If you are unable to achieve them (no such thing as being unable, unless you face serious genetic health limitations), you will not feel fulfilled in life. So, it is important that you identify these priorities and invest in them – pay for them now, not later.

Let’s take a look at your dream lifestyle for example – starting from the basic necessities: You need food, clothing and shelter, but what kind of food? What kind of clotheings? What kind of shelter? If you want skills, what type? These are important foundational questions because they determine what you do with your money. Put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is, is saying, you should  pay for your priorities. I am simply adding that you do so now, not later. When you pay for your priorities now rather than later, you defeat the big monster called ‘procastination’ and its associates. Securing your future today and fast forwarding to your tomorrow is an excellent way of increasing your attitude to life and making you feel happy about who you are, where you are and what you are doing with yourself, your money, your time, while still giving you the joy of the hope you have for an even better future. If most of your desires are in the future, you will find yourself waiting for the future to be happy and keeping away your money in some bank account for spending in the future. This piece is not discouraging  rainy day savings, pensions or equity. Far from that. I am a strong advocate for those because these  are investments which are growing, not stagnant. It is business to do stocks, pension contribution etc, plus you also need to have some percentage of your income set aside to meet important needs. However, if you keep some money long term to e.g. ,build a house, go to school, etc, the probability that you could spend it when a major need arises becomes high, but, if you have already used it to pay for your priorities, it is no longer available to pay for any temptation. It’s been used.  the great thing about paying for your priorities now rather than later is that you will actually feel very happy that you have done it, even if you don’t appear to have funds at a given moment. I am building a house, is better than ‘I will build a house’; A lease to build a house which you wish to use in the future is better than waiting for the future when you personally have the money to build because uncertainties can cause you to dip into your savings. If you apply some smart thinking, you could build and rent, giving you an opportunity to start earning on the house you were hoping to build in the future. Don’t go to school someday, go to school now. Apply the same principle and you will pay for study now not later- a scholarship, a down payment, even a study loan are all available options for you to pay for a study priority now, not later. Just keep positive, keep thinking and you’ll see the window. The great thing about any priority, when addressed, is that it gives you joy, makes you feel fulfilled and generally moves you several steps forward with your goals. Don’t get on the plane ‘one day’, if it is a priority for you. If it matters to your sense of achievement that you fly, get on the plane now, not later. The money you intended to spend on non-priority expenses can pay for your fly-a-plane priority. I could go on and on.

We all hope for the future to be better than now and hope to be alive to see the future but the truth is that no one knows tomorrow. We only know today. There is only one lifetime, not many. So, pay for and achieve your priorities now, not later. There is an issue though and it is the ability to make the things that matter now and will matter later, to be your priorities so that you can fix first things first. If you buy expensive clothes (that’s relative to income), just to fit into a social class when you do not actually meet up to the earning standards of such a class, you are misplacing your priorities especially if you keep buying expensive clothes with a low income. Once in a while or a one off  high expense would have been okay, but as a lifestyle, you soon will run into problems, will not be happy in the long run and are not going to be able to pay for your priorities because you don’t appear to know what your priorities should be.

Nigeria is not just a poor nation but a very poor one and it is not because there is no money, it is because it is not focusing on  its  priorities now, plus the government has a misplaced priority driven by myopic personal interest that is no interest at all. The misplaced priority evidenced by the corruption in the mindset of people in authority, who think they should stack away money for themselves ‘now that they can’, is leaving them eating themselves, their people, their names, their lands and their future. So that the many money  the country has, is unable to do anything meangingful for it. Sixty One years of oil with unpaid priorities in education, infrastructure, maintenance culture, social development, massive agriculture,  etc, is nothing but failure because, until we have a people who know what should be priority, we will always be poor. It’s not how much you have, it’s the priorities you were able to pay for yesterday that will define your tomorrow. since yesterday is gone and you have today, not tomorrow, you can do today what can make your future priorities resolved, sorted and so give a blissful today when tomorrow comes and God willing, it will.

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Remain positive and have a great weekend!