I’d like to open this blog up to guests who have insights they would like to share with my readers, if you’re interested in writing a guest post, please see the guidelines below. Content Your post must be on one of the following areas: – Personal finance – The stock market – Book review (of a finance or related book) – Entrepreneurship Guidelines 1. Your…
Read More
Any investment adviser worth his salt will tell you to include stocks in your investment strategy, but few tell you how to do it. I strongly believe that stocks are great, and should be part of everyone’s long term investment strategy, but I haven’t focused much on them in the past. However, after observing the trends in the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE), then reading this…
Read More
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…
Read More
We are introducing a new section on the blog, Jargon Friday, to appear every Friday (rather obvious isn’ t it?). Jargon Friday aims to simplify some finance and tax terms, and make it easier for a non finance reader to understand our posts, and even more, manage their finances better. In this edition of Jargon Friday, we look at the term: Loan Interest. Definition: Interest is…
Read More
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…
Read More
“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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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….
Read More
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…
Read More