Financial Literacy
Millennials are becoming parents and school fees are getting more expensive
Across Nigeria, children are heading back to school this week, after nearly two months of school break. While this is a good thing, it can also be a source of financial concern for parents.
Across Nigeria, children are heading back to school this week, after nearly two months of school break. While this is a good thing, it can also be a source of financial concern for parents. This is especially so for young parents, many of whom were just students a few years ago. Some of these millennials-turned-parents have only begun to pay school fees for the first time in their lives, and they are not finding the expenses funny.
Imagine this scenario
Segun and Ifeoma (aged 29 and 27 respectively), got married in 2013 shortly after their university days. They welcomed a set of twins a year later and have since birthed one more child. Fast forward to 2019, the twins are aged five years old and already in primary school. What this means, is that the young parents must cough out thousands of naira in school fees for the twins every school term.
Due to such factors as a bad economy, lack of high-paying jobs, and the high unemployment rate in Nigeria, these young parents earn average salaries that can barely take care of their needs. For instance, while Segun’s monthly take-home as a medical doctor is N250,000, his wife earns about N150,000 as an Executive Trainee in a bank. Together, they manage their joint monthly income to take care of a range of expenses such as rent, food, clothing, medical bills, extended families’ needs, and most importantly, their children’s school fees.
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Why school fees are burdensome to millennials-turned parents
The truth is that most public schools in Nigeria offer low-quality services at affordable rates. Therefore, to get quality education for their kids, parents must be willing to spend more. The situation, however, becomes problematic when young parents such as Segun and Ifeoma must squeeze from their earnings to pay these high school fees, bearing in mind that they have a long list of other expenses.
In the early to mid-2000s, Segun attended the Federal Government College at Ijanikin, Lagos. There, the tuition was relatively affordable even as the quality of education was manageable. Now that he is a parent; he knows better than to send his children to public schools, except for a select few anyway. Consequently, he and his wife must bear the cost of sending their kids to private schools where the fees per term are often as high (if not more) than his salary.
How can millennials cope with the high cost of educating their kids?
In a 2018 LinkedIn article which remains relevant till date, financial expert, Damilola Alonge, explained in detail how millennials can best manage the cost of training their children in school. According to him, the answer is simple – young parents should “start building an Education Fund today!” He advocated that every millennial should do this, whether or not they currently have kids.
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Why you need an education fund for your kids
The answer is simple – it is a very smart thing to do. Simply defined, an education fund is money set aside for the purpose of investing in your children’s education. Once again, this is a very wise thing to do because as you may well know, availing a child the right to proper education is one of the best investments any parent can ever make, especially in this part of the world.
It is best to start building an education fund early because the older your children become, the costlier it is to educate them. Starting an education fund for them means that as they grow older, you can easily be able to pay their school fees without becoming overwhelmed.
Let’s get back to Segun and Ifeoma for a second. Their twins’ education will become much more expensive as they graduate to secondary school and then to the university. If the young couple starts now to have an education fund for their children’s future education needs, they’d have a lot of burdens lifted off their shoulders some ten to fifteen years from now.
How the education fund works
Just to be clear, establishing an education fund for your children’s education has nothing to do with opening an account and dumping money in it. Far from it. Instead, it is all about investing. Alonge recommends defining a fixed timeframe between now and when you’d need the money to start paying school fees.
[READ FURTHER: Here’s what Warren Buffet thinks parents should teach their kids about money]
You will also need to factor in the kind of university you’d like your child to attend, as well as how much it currently costs to send a child to such a school. Doing all this will help you know how much of your monthly salary you will need for “investing in a mix of asset classes like equities, fixed income, USD assets, real estate, mutual funds, etc.”
For instance, if Segun and Ifeoma want to start an education fund to take care of their twin’s tertiary education, they can come up with a 12-year investment plan – 12 years representing the timeframe between when the kids will finish with their primary and secondary education before proceeding to the university.
Upon starting the education fund, professional investment/financial planners can then help the couple to monitor the growth of their investments towards the purpose for which they have been made.
MSME
FG to support MSME contribution to economy to boost development – Minister
The Minister said that the FG has schemes aimed at improving the post-pandemic climate for SMEs in Nigeria.
The Federal Government declared that it is working with stakeholders to improve MSME participation in the economy through improving the business climate which will create jobs.
This was disclosed by Amb. Mariam Katagum, Minister of State for Industry, Trade and Investment, at the 7th EMPRETEC Global Summit, on Tuesday, themed “The Role of Entrepreneurship, MSME and EMPRETEC in post-COVID-19 Resurgence.”
The Minister stated that the MSME sector of the economy is the growth engine of any economy which contributes to its development, job creation and export, amongst others.
“An MSMEs survey indicates that Nigeria’s SMEs contribute nearly 50 percent of the country’s GDP and account for over 80 percent of employment. No doubt, the sector is pivotal to Nigeria’s growth, including reducing poverty and unemployment levels.
It has, therefore, become more apparent that supporting entrepreneurs and small businesses by creating opportunities for MSMEs to thrive is essential for increasing productivity, creating jobs, and boosting our economy.
This is why the Government is working with stakeholders across all sectors, to create the enabling environment for entrepreneurs and MSMEs to ensure that they grow now and into the future,” she stated.
On economic sustainability
The Minister said that the FG has schemes aimed at improving the post-pandemic climate for SMEs in Nigeria. She also disclosed that the FG launched the National Policy on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), a framework for the resolution of the challenges faced by the sector.
The programmes launched by the FG includes the Survival Fund and Guaranteed Off-take Schemes, operated by a Steering Committee in the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment.
“The Government of Nigeria had, prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, initiated the MSMEs Clinics scheme as a strategy, aimed at providing support for the MSMEs in the country.
At the clinics, operators in the MSMEs space are engaged by regulators and business advisory experts, on issues ranging from entrepreneurship, skill development, finance, quality & standards, and on how to facilitate and grow their businesses and enterprises,” she added.
What you should know
Nigeria’s unemployment rate as of the end of 2020 rose to 33.3% from 27.1% recorded as of Q2 2020, indicating that about 23,187,389 (23.2 million) Nigerians remain unemployed.
A combination of both the unemployment and underemployment rate for the reference period gave a figure of 56.1%. This means that 33.3% of the labour force in Nigeria or 23,187,389 persons either did nothing or worked for less than 20 hours a week, making them unemployed by our definition in Nigeria.
Financial Literacy
How to move from a decent salary to a lucrative income (Part 1)
First, create an anchor position for your decent lifestyle; next, increase your earning capacity; third, earn a lucrative income and lastly, preserve the income that you have earned.
There is a common element that is present among all working professionals that achieve financial freedom. This element is their ability to move from earning a decent salary to earning a lucrative income. A decent salary is an income that gives you a decent lifestyle, and a decent lifestyle is any lifestyle that is comfortable in the present.
So, when you hear working professionals talk about having a decent income, what they mean is that their present life is working. And that they can pay their bills without financial stress. A decent salary is thus heavily invested in maintaining life today. This means that income from a decent salary is invested in income-consuming activities more than income-preserving activities. While it is good to maintain life today. It is even better to secure life tomorrow.
This is because life is advancing towards the future and the future will soon be here. Also, jobs don’t last forever and when they go away, they take all the decent salary that is funding your current decent lifestyle. Thus, if maintaining a decent lifestyle throughout life is your goal, you must move from income that is heavily invested in making today comfortable to income that is invested in maintaining comfort throughout life. This is where having a lucrative income comes in.
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A lucrative income is an income that is heavily invested in preserving life today and in the future. Lucrative income is more focused on keeping and growing income for the days when salary is no more. This is because only preserved income will matter in those days. And those days are already upon us. So, if you are looking for the best time to prepare, today is the day. As the worst time to prepare is when you are already in the future. Becoming wise in the future will not do you any good. Thus, a well-structured lucrative income helps you prepare in three ways. First, it buys you financial freedom. Secondly, it expands your options and opportunities, and thirdly, it gives you financial peace of mind.
So, if your goal is to achieve financial freedom someday and maintain the decent lifestyle that you have become so accustomed to over the years, you must build income for the future by converting your decent salary to a lucrative income. The purpose of this article is to show you exactly how you can achieve that.
So how do you create your own lucrative income?
There are four steps to follow and each step must follow in the right order. The first step is to create an anchor position for your decent lifestyle. The second is to increase your earning capacity. The third step is to earn a lucrative income. And the fourth step is to preserve the income that you have earned.
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Step 1. Create an anchor position for a decent lifestyle
You need to define what a decent lifestyle is for you and there are two kinds of decent lifestyles. The first is the financial freedom decent lifestyle and the second is the financial slavery decent lifestyle. The financial freedom decent lifestyle is the lifestyle that meets your basic needs and yet preserves a big part of your income. And financial slavery decent lifestyle is the lifestyle that sacrifices your savings.
To achieve financial freedom, you must choose the financial freedom decent lifestyle. This is the only lifestyle that can lead to financial freedom. The reason is that only saving a big part of your income can give you financial freedom. And You can’t out-earn extravagant living. Thus, you must anchor spending while you work on savings. To save a big part of your income you must save between 25-60% of your income. This means that you must anchor your decent lifestyle between 70 to 40% of your current income.
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When you decide which anchor position is suitable for you, fix your expenses at this point and channel all extra income towards your savings. These include your bonuses, allowances, investment returns, and side incomes. Savings and expenses cannot grow at the same time. You must decide which one of them grows and which of them is anchored to a fixed position. Anchoring your expenses while growing your savings is thus, crucial to creating a lucrative income and achieving financial freedom. When you decide what a suitable anchor position is for you, you must stay anchored at this position until you achieve financial freedom.
So how do you anchor your spending?
To anchor your spending, you must first know how much you spend each month. If you are already within the 70-40% expense bracket you may want to look for other ways to push your savings beyond where you are. The key is to work towards saving more than you spend. But if you are outside the range, you are in a financial bondage position and are heading towards financial pain.
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A financial bondage position is any position that puts your savings below 25% of your income. Most people are in this position and sadly they are anchoring their savings at a meagre 5-10% and growing their expenses. Saving under a quarter of your income is potential pain because you cannot maintain your current lifestyle at less than a quarter of your income. To maintain a decent lifestyle throughout life, you must save more than you spend and keep your spending anchored while growing your savings.
There are three savings positions to choose from if you want to speed up financial success. The first is called the quarter plus savings position. This is where you save a quarter or more of your income each month. The second position is called the mid-point savings position. This is where you save half of your income (50%) each month. The third savings position is the supreme position. This is where you save more than you spend, that is, above 50% of your income. To achieve financial freedom, you must decide whether you want to work hard on your freedom or do so on your expenses. Whichever you decide, it will be reflected in your report card at the end of your career.
Step 2. Increase your Earning Capacity
The fastest way to create a lucrative income is to earn more income. To earn more income, you must increase your earning capacity beyond what it is right now. Increasing your earning capacity means increasing your ability to solve high-income problems because money is made when you solve problems for other people. To solve high-income problems, you need four key elements. You need knowledge. You need skills. You need Productivity. And you need Relationships.
Knowledge is information that helps you see how things work. It is different from understanding. Understanding is derived from the application of knowledge. And from converting knowledge into skills and experiences. Productivity is getting more work done within a shorter time and creating more free time for yourself. When you produce more, you’re worth more. So, the key to productivity is to increase the quantity and quality of work that you do.
Relationships are also critical because income is produced within the context of a relationship. If you want to earn more, you must be worth more in knowledge, skills, productivity, and relationships. The sad news is most people only focus on acquiring knowledge. And knowledge may be power but it is the least income-producing element among the four. In fact, knowledge is useless until applied. To focus your savings on acquiring knowledge that has low-income value is not wise. Rather focus your savings on acquiring knowledge that can produce high and almost instant income.
The second mistake I see people make when they want to increase their income is investing in the wrong skills. They invest in skills that have little relevance outside the career world. And lose all their investment once they are out of a job or in retirement. They also invest in low-income skills. A low-income skill is any skill that does not add any specific and measurable value to company profits and revenue.
The problem with low-income skills is that they produce low income no matter how hard you work or how much it cost you to get them. And the problem with career-related skills is that they can only be applied in the career world. In the career world, you have zero control over your income and the value that is placed on your skills. So, developing low-income skills or career-related skills does not only limit your income, it makes your life miserable at the end of your career.
To achieve financial freedom, you must focus on acquiring high-income skills. And there are three high-income skills to acquire. The first is creativity – the ability to produce wealth-creating ideas. The second is relationship building – the ability to meet new people, engage in meaningful conversations and build trusted relationships. The third is marketing – the ability to convince customers that you and your product are worth more than the price tag on them. Without these three skills, you can’t create a lucrative income.
The third mistake I see most people make when they want to increase their income is to focus too much on investing as the means for earning extra income. While investing is great and can grow your income. Investing is NOT an income-producing activity and cannot make up for the gap in your own personal ability to produce or earn a high income. If it could, successful business owners would have closed their businesses and faced investing full-time. But they don’t because they know that the only powerful way to produce income is through your own personal ability to produce and solve problems. They use investing as a means to preserve and grow earned income and this is what you must do.
Depending on investment income to make up for your own low ability to earn income is a loser’s game. And there are three reasons why. Most people do not even have the size of cash reserves that can produce the amount of passive income they can depend on. What they then do is demand more than a safe return from their meagre investments and lose their money. And then they repeat the process all over again or are scared to death to invest which is even worse. There is a limit beyond which investing becomes harmful and not beneficial.
The second reason is that growing income through investing is a slower process and there is a limit to how much growth you can achieve. While a person can earn N500 million in a day through their own personal ability to produce and solve problems. They cannot push the same results out of their investments without losing it. The only way to still earn high income today is to use your personal ability to solve high-income problems.
Growing money and earning money are two different activities, and earning money is more powerful than growing money. The third and final reason why focusing on investing may not work for you is that it takes money to make investment money. Once you have the money it’s easy to find someone that can guide you to invest it. And money only comes when you have a personal ability to produce and solve problems.
So, while you can use your personal ability to earn income from scratch, it takes a lot of money to achieve investing success. I know this because 80% of people end up broke and resentful in retirement despite years of investing. The problem is not that they did not invest. The problem is that they were focusing on the slowest path to achieving financial freedom. The fastest path is always and would always be through your own personal ability to earn income. To earn a lucrative income you must become an expert at solving high-income problems.
Step 3. Earn a Lucrative Income
A lucrative income is any income that is bigger than the workload. It is income you can earn part-time working less and earning more. You need this kind of income to supplement your already heavy workload. To earn a lucrative income there are six things that must do.
The first thing is to learn sales. You must be able to sell yourself, sell your message and sell your ideas to other people. The second thing you must do is choose the right industry. Not all industries are created equal or have the same capacity to produce millionaires. To earn a lucrative income, you must work for industries that sell high ticket products and can pay high sales commission.
The next thing you must do is choose the right company. Not all companies within an industry offer the same benefits. Some companies are more reputable than others and have strengths that others do not have. So, you must choose wisely.
Next, you must choose the right products and services. Your success in earning a high income is dependent on your ability to sell. Do not make sales harder by selling difficult to sell products. You will not only delay your income you will be frustrated to quit.
Next is to look for and join a platform that offers a diverse range of lucrative income-earning opportunities. If you cannot create these opportunities on your own. And finally, you must take action and engage in income-producing activities in your spare time. These are the five things to do if you want to earn a lucrative income.
To succeed even further, you must follow the lucrative income guiding principles. There are four income principles to live by if you want to earn a lucrative income fast. The first is the funding principle and it states – if it would take money to get started, make the money elsewhere in sources that do not require money to start. The second is the freedom principle and it states – if you can only gain financial freedom by building solid cash reserves, better add a lucrative income to your main income and speed up the process. The third principle is the time principle. It states that if it would take a long time to earn income in a particular path, better get started now. The fourth is the people principle and it states that – if it will take knowing people to earn a high income, better become the person that other people want to know.
If you live by these principles and do the six things stated above you would increase your income dramatically.
Watch out for the concluding part of this series…
About the author
Grace Agada is a recognized leading Financial Expert on Nigerian Soil. She is a Renowned Speaker, Author, and Column Contributor in Punch Newspaper, This Day Newspaper, Vanguard newspaper, Business Day Newspaper, Leadership Newspaper, The Tribune Newspaper, and Online Platforms like Nairametrics, Proshare, and Bellanaija. Grace is the author of “The Financial Freedom MBA Program, “The Passive Income Retirement Blueprint” and “The Wealthy Business Blueprint” for Advisors, Consultants, and Coaches who want to get off the roller coaster of irregular income. Grace is on a mission to shrink the middle class and populate the upper class. Her ultimate goal is to create a tribe of professionals that are thriving in any economy. Grace has been featured on BBC Africa. Business Day TV. Inspiration FM. and inside Naijatv. She has consulted for Numerous Top Organizations, Company Directors, Senior Executives, and Top performing Professionals.
