Learn how to grow rich from the rich

The paradox of wealth accumulation is such that very wealthy men are also the most fickle. Warren Buffet, the second richest man in the world lives in a simple house he bought in 1958 even though his fortune stands at US$ 37 Billion. In an environment where many Chief Executive Officers were paying themselves millions of dollars, Buffet was like a lost sheep, but now the same so-called success story company executives previously at the helm of collapsing institutions like America Insurance Group (AIG) and Britain’s Royal Bank of Scotland look like rabbits caught in the headlights. Suddenly everyone is running to oracle of Omaha for financial advice including the most powerful man in the world, president Barrack Obama. Similarly, a man more famous for his ragged hair and his empire of computers, Bill Gates, is not known for his profligate ways. These two men both display the principle of persistence on one side and delayed gratification on the other, both of which are very absent in the way that the many young men and women in Rwanda today who want financial independence. We want to spend our way from paycheck to paycheck, deal to deal, our idea of good life being a party-strewn playboy lifestyle in the company of similar-thinking hangers on.Birds of the same feather flock together. If you want to be rich and most of the time, you are in the company of whining workmates and football fanatical drunk buddies there is only one way you can turn out – a whiner employee and a drunk. According to Warren Buffet, “It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.” It therefore goes that if you want to be rich you should associate with rich people. If you spend most of your time with ambitionless individuals you will end up the king of the ambitionless. Also the richest individuals are usually the ones who discover that a penny spent in the future is many times more worthy than that spent immediately. Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America put it that a penny saved is a penny earned. Saving money at the start always appears like a fruitless venture when you look at your small earnings and your excessive money demands. However cultivating a good spending and saving habit is one of the hardest but surest ways to reach financial independence. The other responding excuse that most people use is that they have no career or job that pays well so they can not even think of saving money or investing it in the first place. In our world today, both in the western world where wealth accumulation is a buzz word and in Africa where poverty is more excruciating, they are always people who stand out as particularly wealthy. Most of these people do not follow the good education-nice safe career-life long pension model to get rich. They use a hobby or risk their hand at business or specialize in a profession often using it to break the employment chain. After trying hard they often become very wealthy. It all lies in the fact that an individual should recognize what he is good at and be able to persist at it until he makes a breakthrough. Uganda’s popular singer Jose Chameleone is one such person who braved the streets of Nairobi while trying to learn the ropes of the industry but today can afford to buy a custom made Cadillac Escalade 2004 model for himself and a Range Rover Sport super charger each at an estimated price of over US$ 50,000 (over twenty eight million Rwanda francs) just from singing. Many people who “fall” into money, like lottery winners, have been known to spend their way lavishly into poverty. One financial quote by an unknown goes, “the real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money.” Money without knowledge is like fire without control. Donald Trump, an American business magnate who made himself riches in real estate, lost everything in a recession and later re-emerged as a successful real estate developer once said that “Most people think small because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.” So with knowledge also comes the willingness to take risks. For example instead of saving money in the bank for 5% annual interest why not invest wisely in stocks or government securities at the Rwanda Over The Counter Market (which money can grow by leaps and bounds or can disappear in a flash?). The cardinal rule however is that you must spend less than you earn, however little or much you earn in order to grow rich. kelviod@yahoo.com