Family Finance: Understanding True Wealth in Family PT 11
Wealth is deeper than what people are taking it to be. It is not just about money or the number of cars in your garage, it is by far deeper and greater than that. We need to examine this deeply and learn how to become truly wealthy in our families.
1. Properties. Landed properties, houses, stocks, company ownership are also part of wealth. It is good to have all these, take your time to invest in them and manage them well. Please note that cars, electronics, clothings, shoes, bags, etc are not part of wealth; they are what is known as ‘downward investment’. Do not count the number of cars in your garage, the number of clothes in your wardrobe or the number of shoes on your rack and get excited thinking you are wealthy; no! You are not; because they do not add to you, they even take away from you and may even destroy your financial base.
Invest in good properties; they are the real investment and wealth. Prepare your tomorrow today, make your future sure.
2. Life Experiences. Experience they say, is the best teacher. Employers of labour prefer to employ experienced staff. Why? Experience is wealth; they pay to buy the wealth and to utilize it for themselves.
Make good use of your life experiences. Your success, knowledge, failure, information, etc should not be disregarded. Use it, monetize it and profit out of it. Don’t put it under the table; nobody is too old to use his or her life experience. Like wine; it gets better with age.
Look inward, what have you learnt about life, business, marriage, health, crisis management, finance, people and leadership? What do you know that younger generations do not know? That is money, use it. A guy who worked in the banking industry for more than fifteen years, lost his job together with some of his colleagues, while some of his colleagues were still mourning their loss of jobs, he came out with a training and consulting outfit; training young bankers and rendering consultancy services to the banking industry. Today, he pays his managers more than what he was earning as a banker. Do something with your experience; your experience is your wealth; use it well.
3. Godly Children. Your children should be very important to you because they are your future’s true wealth. Remember, you are not yet a success until you have a good successor. You can’t say you are a success if you raise criminals, vagabonds and ruffians as children. Many parents run after money 24hours of their lives neglecting their children in the process. The children of such people grow up to become a disappointment.
To be a true successful parent, you must be available. Who is a successful parent? You may ask, some may think a successful parent is a parent whose children are all graduates or master degree holders, or parents who are having grand children, or whose children have built houses, buy cars, work in good places and even travel abroad. While all these are good for our children; they are not the true measurements of successful parenting. You are only a successful parent when your children knows the Lord, genuinely born again, heavenly bound, they are able to stand on their own, they are blessings to the society, they are useful to God, having blissful marriage and are of impeccable character.
“A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish man despiseth his mother”.
Proverbs 15:20.
To be a truly wealthy man or woman, your children must be upright and credible.
No child can grow to become these naturally, you need to tend, groom, nurture and care for your children before they can become what you want them to be. And to nurture and groom them; you must be available when they need you. Don’t just give them ‘monetary’ give them ‘monitoring’. Pray for them; teach, train, love them and tell them you do.
By all means; raise godly children, that is true wealth. Remember the Yoruba adage that says, “The child you don’t ‘build’ will be the one who will sell the house you built”.
4. Financial Intelligence. Money is not wealth, what is wealth? Wealth is financial intelligence. That is wisdom to make money and to spend it to generate more money in increasing order, moving the man from poor level to average, to rich level then to wealth or flourishing level.
It is not the amount of money you have in your bank account that really matters but your ability to manage the one you have and even make more.
Financial intelligence is a virtue that is in short supply in our society today, that is why we have millions of millionaires of yesteryears, they made money, but they didn’t have the knowledge to manage it. You will agree with me that management and maintenance is one of the major problems in Africa today. A former military president once said, Nigeria problem is not about money but how to spend it. What a statement!
Develop yourself about money management. Learn to save money; live below your means, spend less than you make to avoid debt and to invest the rest. You can never go beyond your level without deep financial intelligent.
Bisi Adewale is a family expert and president of college of marital success, He is an international conference speaker and an author of more than 52 books on marriage and family life, singles, love, sex and purity and intimacy. He is the host of family T.V. program called Family Booster Moments.
Get daily lesson and teaching and articles from his blog: bisiadewale.com and You can also get his resources and also send an mail to familybooster01@yahoo.com. for any counselling issue. Visit https://bisiadewale.com for daily updating!
