My monthly budgeting model is such that instead of planning for every single item I intend to buy, I set aside the following (in order of importance): Savings and Giving Rent Debts (if any) Other bills (fuel, electricity etc) House shopping Whatever remains after that is my “Float” or spending money. When it runs out, I stop spending. For that reason, I rarely track the…
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In Part 1 of the 50,000 dollar problem, we looked at my techie friend’s dilemma. He’d come across Kshs 50,000, and was looking to make “good” and certain returns in a year, and since I wasn’t offering him any viable solutions, he was going to buy the iPad2 instead. My advice to him was to take a SACCO loan to pay for his gadget. Why…
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“I have 50,000 bob, where can I invest it for one year and make good returns, without risking the money?” That was my gadgets loving friend asking over Gtalk. For some reason, we don’t like to ask money questions face to face. His question is The 50,000 Bob Problem: You have made some money, too much to waste, just the right amount for the latest gadget…
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In 2009, Sunny Bindra wrote an article aptly titled: Did Your CEO Win an Award, You should Start Worrying. At the time, I was working in a tech company that had won a major entrepreneurship award, and the article did its rounds in the company, bypassing the CEO of course.Sunny could have been sitting in our open plan office when writing the article, because the…
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Ending the week on a light note… Last week, someone took mercy on me and replaced my long-suffering Nokia E63 with an iPhone 4. The initial excitement came with a whole lot of misadventures that I just thought to share. I thought this stuff only happened to other people: The first thing I wanted on the phone was Twitter of course, so I Googled Twitter…
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Most clubs are born of casual conversation in a social settings, where friends, inspired by various things, but mostly the emotion around being rich discuss and agree to pool funds towards an investment goal. It’s however not advisable to start making contributions on the spot, an investment club is a long term commitment, and it requires a bit more structure than casual conversation can give….
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Yesterday, I saw a couple of tweets that implied that M Pesa has fueled inflation (See the article here), and my first instinct was to write this off as hogwash. Then, when @thedorc asked me this question, I was forced to think a little deeper: In responding to @thedorc, I’ll try be use language that’s as simple as possible, without offending the hard…
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About 5 years ago, investment clubs were all the range in Kenya. Even I was a member of one. Inspired by the Transcentury story, everyone wanted to join in an investment club, and to “become a millionaire”. However, few clubs have been successful, and it seems today fewer young people are part of investment clubs. I however remain an advocate of Investment Clubs for several reasons: …
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In my post; Personal Finance 101, I mentioned expense tracking as the starting point in coming up with a budget. In this post, I will share 3 expense tracking methods that have worked for me. 1. The Notebook This was the first, probably most archaic method I ever used, but it worked! I basically carried a notebook in my handbag, and had a page for…
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This is a graphical representation of top words used in this blog. Very cool! Thanks to Wordle
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