There is something magical about money. When you have it you can do wonders. You can take care of your health, your family, your social needs like education, shelter and food. you can contribute to the development of the community and so on. Once you don’t have it, you begin getting worried, stressed and inconvenienced. When you don’t have money you sacrifice a lot that you would have done for your good and the good of the community.

This is why it’s important that every individual develops mechanisms that increase their financial freedom. It starts by ensuring that we monitor our cashflow to ensure that we earn more than we spend. There’s no other way around it. Maybe I could share with you my own experience. 

Like many people, I used claim that money disappears through my fingers. I would leave home with a certain amount, only to be surprised that in a few hours nothing is left in my pocket. I would try to figure out how I spent the money to no avail. So I would assume that maybe some of it got lost. 

One day I met Patrick Bitature, a leading Ugandan businessman who later became my mentor. Part of what I learnt from him was the importance of a good cash flow. I discovered that to have financial freedom, my daily cash inflow (income) must be greater than my daily cash outflow (expenditure), if I am.

By then I was the kind of person who would receive big money once a month, yet spending everyday. Thus, I would be rich for a few days, but very poor for the rest of the days in the month. So I made a major decision – to cut down my daily expenditure and increase my daily income. It required a lot of discipline but I had to either do it or do it. 

I started by taking 2 weeks of recording all my expenditures, making sure to account for every coin. When I glanced at the list of what had been consuming my money, I felt ashamed. Some of the items were outright unnecessary because I could have lived without them, while others could have been postponed. Delaying gratification and investing for better results in the future is timeless wisdom.

The next step was to train myself to always make a daily budget and stick to it. I Somehow money will always find an excuse to make you spend it; you must be courageous enough to stand on your two legs and say ‘No’. It beats logic to find young people who are earning very little taking big salary loans to buy cars just to drive to work and park. These cars are not assets but liabilities; they will continue to increase expenditure instead of income. A wiser person gets that loan and invests it in something that brings money, such as constructing rental houses. 

Dear reader, whether you are employed, self-employed or in business, the question I leave you with this week is: "On a daily basis, are you earning more than you spend?”

Bake is the md World of Inspiration & founder, Authors’ Forum