We may want to ask, what is savings? So many people have different ways they will define this and I will define this in the simplest way which is, saving is the act of keeping money aside for a short or a long-term goal. Sometimes, we do not need to have a goal to save, like the popular saying, "we save for raining days".
What do we mean by raining days? We mean those days in the future when things aren’t working well at that point in time and why won't things work well as usual? It is because this is life and we will not have everything going our way, things will not necessarily be smooth. It could be that some of our businesses no longer bring that revenue as usual due to some unforeseen situations, all these things are what we cannot predict.
Some persons lose their Jobs, some incomes are cut short unexpectedly, delay in the payment of salaries and the likes. In situations like this, these are times when our savings will help us and see us through.
I will not underestimate the power of savings because I know how useful it could be when the need arises. Even if it is little you are saving, it is something that would work out for you. There is an app I do save with called "Cowrywise App". There are two plans in which I use to save. Emergency and General savings. For the Emergency, I can easily withdraw whenever I need it while for the General Savings is for a set time and date so it would be locked up until the stipulated time to be unlocked and you get your savings for whatever you want to use it for. The little interest that comes in depend on how much you save daily.
DIFFERENT MEDIUMS TO SAVE
One popular way that we save in the olden days and still very relevant now is using a local piggy bank which some of us know as ‘’kolo’’. We can randomly keep any spare money we have at the end of the day. We can take out some money out from our salaries and save and other places depending on where and how we get our money which can be different for everybody, my point is save something daily or weekly.
Like the popular saying, a drop of water can turn into an ocean. We might think an amount is too small, but with consistency, just see how things can turn in months or year depending on the goal you have put on such savings.
We can save in bank. We all are different. Some persons will say they cannot make use of the local piggy bank and that they can easily be led to open it at any point in time which I consider a lack of discipline. If that is not working, we can use banks. We have different banks and we do have accounts in all these banks, stick to one and make that your savings account, just keep saving!
We can save in Cryptocurrency. I love this one especially because I wouldn't lie, I don't like saving in the bank because I won't get any interest, instead they make use of my money and at the end of the day, I would be given low interest but in Cryptocurrency, we all know the laws of bull and dip moment, it is still safer to save in different cryptos like btc, bch, eth and the likes because we believe our money will keep growing and we would have much when we do save. Hodling my BCH means I am saving because I will have a lot of profit at the end.
Furthermore, we have peer savings. Back then in school, I use to have this set or clique, we come together to save and how do we achieve this? We say each week, everyone must bring this amount of money and depending on the position we have taken, turn by turn, we get money every week, that is usually fun. But when you are the first to take money in the first week and let say we have about 10 more weeks to go which means 10 more people that are yet to collect, it will no longer be fun for that person because they get tired along the way but they have no choice than to commit till everyone gets their money, funny right?
Above are not just the only medium, there are more but I just had to deal with few popular ones.
REASONS TO SAVE
Short term goals: This means things we just want to buy to use for a while, it could be a mobile phone, washing machine, chair, laptop or smaller things. We know how expensive things can really be, if we keep saying our salaries are small, we don’t have money, it will be difficult to achieve so many goals, but with discipline, this can be achieved.
Take for example, you want to get a laptop, the first and reasonable thing to do here is figure out the type of laptop you want to get, go to the laptop market, life is easy now, we can check online for any kind of things we want and see all prices, let assume you check online and the laptop is about N100,000 ($200) and we have nothing on us, that is fine, we can actually achieve this, anyone can.
Add extra amount to it, let say N10,000 ($20) extra, this amount is there for an in-case scenario. Maybe by the time we want to get the laptop, it is N5000 ($10) greater than what we saw online, but with the extra added, no need to panic. Figure out how much you earn on a monthly basis, let say you earn N50,000 ($100), once the money comes in after removing your tithe for those that pay, you have about N45000 ($90) left, take out N20000 ($40) aside and save for the laptop. Then you know that in 5 months you should be able to achieve this goal, maximum 6 months and you can get your laptop, then you can use the rest for monthly upkeep.
I am going to stop here for today as we have a long way to go on this topic, on Thursday you will get more nuggets on money matters. Have a great day.
Thanks for reading
|November 02, 2021|
Peer Saving is called in the Philippines as "Paluwagan" and there are times that those who claimed already, may not be able to pay on the next rounds. There are cooperative savings, where one can put a capital and get shares of the profits.