Greetings!
One of the important parts of human life is maintenance which is a culture each and everyone of us should imbibe or cultivate. Maintenance is a culture that some people neglected and are taking with levity. Though, it may be something not serious, but it kills one in a gradual way. For one to have a functional life, he or she must be able to maintain him or herself in all facets of his or her life. When maintenance is lost, then life stop functioning and it becomes miserable.
So, for one to be able to maintain his life and everything put in his care, such person must be a good strategist. This is to say that, maintenance comes with strategies and it is by this means, that one can succeed in maintaining all he has. For instance, some of the infrastructure put in place in my area has gone back to nothing. Why? The answer is not far fetched than to say, it's a lack of maintenance culture.
Going by this week hivereachout prompt, one thing I have realized is that our lives is like the infrastructure I earlier mentioned and if we don't put up good strategies to maintaining it, we may not actually get the right result and this will not only affect us alone but extends to the coming generations.
So in the view of this, I will like to share some of the strategies to be put in place in maintaining our financial stability.
For us to be financially stable, there's measures and strategies to be put in place.
All these strategies and measures I have tried and they are all working wonders for me. Talking about these strategies I will like to state it clear that, they all come with there own challenges too. Some of these strategies are; budgeting, expense management, savings , emergency fund, debt management, wealth creation etc.
So, to start with, one of those strategies listed above is budgeting which has really helped me in stabilizing my finanaces. Budgeting which is the management of money and other asset is one of the major strategies to be put in place to have a good financial stability. No wonder the various government organs, agencies and parastatal prepare their yearly fiscal plan and this, taking to the legislative arm by the executive.
Seeing this process, I decided to have my own family style of budget preparation and this has been working magic for us as a family. This is how we do it. At the beginning of every year, I and my wife with the children used to come together and plan the year ahead, some of those things we used to put into consideration are; the children school fee, feeding, transportation, clothing, car and house maintenance and other needed things. Also, we make provisions for miscellaneous. Though, in most cases, we spent more than our estimated budget or even below. But notwithstanding, it's always set us free from financial recklessness and stabilizes our finances.
Also, setting our needs and priorities right has really helped us in stabilizing our finances, there were time we always go for our want instead of going for our needs. Doing this in those days really affected us and brought our finances down to it knees , but when we realized that, there's some things that are not so important to spend on, we changed our mode of operation and set our scale of preference right. Doing this alone saved us from going bankrupt and even stabilized our finances. Now, if anyone invites us to a function and it's a must for us to be there, one thing we now do as a family is to send one of us to attend the function and save cost. But if it's not even necessary for us to go or be at the function, we send money to the person doing the celebration. This has really helped us. There are things we used to get but were not needed or necessary back then, but now we only get those things that are needed maybe for consumption or for use.
Another of my strategy of maintaining my financial stability is debt management, sometimes ago, I obtained loan worth million of naira, but while paying it back, I could not meet up with the payment with the interest on the rise. But thank God a friend came to my rescue to pay the debt. Though, I used the money to invest in a business, but the business did not really work out as planned, so, I was able to pay the debt with the help of a friend and since then, if there's any loan I must collect, it must be on something I'm very sure of yielding profit and it must even be a known business not what i don't have any idea of doing. The problem is that some collect loan to eat or do functions, this is an act of financial recklessness and will only bring the finances of such person or family to a standstill.
Wealth creation is another strategy of mine that has really helped me and my family. In the past, I solely relied on my only source of income which is my monthly salary from the public service and for this sole source of income, I was not doing fine at all as I was not able to meet up with the economy situation of the time. But when I realized that this my only source of income will not take me to my preferred destination, I decided to turn my tides around by investing in landed properties, agricultural produce , transportation and so on and this has really helped me in creating wealth for me, my family and my generations even my unborn generation. Though, this wealth creation of mine didn't come easy, but at the end, it's making sense.
So, in maintaining one's financial stability, making good use of the above listed and many more strategies will surely go a long way in stabilizing our finances, not only that, it will create immediate and future wealth for all.
This is my entry to the hivereachout weekly prompt.
Thanks for reading.
All pictures are mine.