There's Rice At Home - Ingredients and Side Dishes
Thank you to everyone who has been following this series, if you read last week’s post you’ll know why I haven’t posted but I’m back now and with a very resourceful post.
This is the second to last instalment of the Wealth Series which I’ve been excited to share for a while now, so let’s get started. Below I have mentioned a number of resources and methods that I have used to start my wealth journey and improve my understanding of personal finance.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: I have a few referral links in this post, so this means if you click and use/sign up for anything I’ve mentioned I’ll be compensated.
The other day my friend and I decided to catch up at her new apartment, it was a public holiday here and I had wanted to prepare Jollof Rice for her as a housewarming treat. My friend is from South Africa, so Jollof Rice is very much a delicacy for her. We made our plans and then decided that I make the pot of Jollof at her place while she watched me learn; we stopped at the grocery store to buy everything we needed and when she saw only a few ingredients in my basket she said “is that all we need?”.
Finance, in general, had always seemed complex to me, so I didn’t even bother to learn it for myself, it’s only when things were shown and explained to me that I realised that ‘not much’ is required to start a successful wealth journey but one must know how to use the ‘little’ to have a great impact. Like Jollof Rice ingredients, personal finance is not that complex.
Ingredients - What You’ll Need
Financial Plan Prayer
Relationship with Money
Know where Your Money is
Wealth Goals
Budget
Debt Tracker
Initial Prep Time: 2 hours
Weekly Prep Time: 45 minutes to 1 hour per week (for reviewing, updating and refining)
Feeds: Generations
Step One
Preheat your heart and mind with prayer. Be honest with yourself about your current situation and ask God for His help. You can use the Financial Plan Prayer as a Guide and feel free to tailor the prayer to your personal style.
Step Two
Assess your relationship with money. Finely dice through the questions and season well with in-depth answers. This step takes a while as it requires a lot of thinking back to the past. At this stage you’ll also establish and realise what you really want for yourself, you’ll find that it is more than finances and wealth. This step isn’t required on a monthly basis, however, it’s advised to check in on your notes frequently as a reminder.
Step Three
Now you know what you want, add to the mix what you have. Where is your money? Do you have savings, current accounts, investments, old pension accounts with previous employers, do you have money owed to you? Do you have debts? Add it all into your pot of new beginnings. By completing this step you can clearly see how much money you really have (at the moment), you can determine if you need the various accounts you have opened and so on. List your accounts down and mention their functions/uses, list your debts down (total amounts) and the reasons you have them. Listing and calculating your actual figures is working out your Net Worth = Assets-Liabilities.
Assets: Money/Investments you have
Liabilities: Debts
Step Four
Once you’ve simmered over your Net Worth, take a handful of sweet and healthy wealth goals and stir it in gently. My advice is that you add your wealth goals in parts by distinguishing your long term and short term wealth goals and be realistic and easy on yourself.
Essentially your short-term goals should help achieve your long-term goals. For example, Aunty Rita’s long-term wealth goal is to have £50,000 saved for each of her three sons by the time they each turn 18 years old. This money will go towards their university education (so approx. total £150,000, based on current UK fees per year) - her sons are currently 8, 6 and 4 years old.
Her short-term wealth goals need to help her achieve this target in the years she has. One of her short-term goals is to open an investment account/Junior ISA for each of her boys within the next month, where both she and her husband will deposit £50 each per month in all three accounts (saving and investing a total of £300 a month). Interest and dividends will be reinvested into these accounts.
Long-term is often defined as over 5 years and short-term is anything less than 5 years.
Step Five
Your Wealth sauce is ready, you’re determined to do better and you have a clear idea of what you need to do, now bring out your containers, you need to distribute your sauce; in other words, you need to do a budget and allocate your funds. Your budget should reflect your goals and intentions. Sticking to your budget can be difficult and sometimes you might not even care for it, but it’s important to stick to it and check in on it often (I’m preaching to myself right now).
Step Six
Now your wealth meal is ready, it’s time to start cleaning the kitchen. It’s time to get rid of debt. Your budget will already include your monthly debt payments however it also a good idea to have a debt tracker you can use to monitor your progress.
Side Dishes - Useful Additions to Your Wealth Journey and Learning
Jollof Rice is a dish that on its own it’s still amazing, however, to enjoy it more and to enhance the flavour on every grain of rice, the addition of chicken/fish/beef and fried plantain really makes the dish magical. For my vegan readers, you can substitute chicken for something more suitable (but well seasoned).
Learning the basics of personal finance is the foundation and I have found that as I have developed an interest in the topic so has my knowledge and access to resources. I’ll say this now, I like to keep my resources limited with so much information available it can easily become overwhelming. I stick to what has worked for me so far, and I’ve only been able to know this through ‘trial and error’. Not every side dish should be on your plate, but here are a few I have on mine.
Apps: Banking & Investing
With the introduction of Apps, we’ve become dependent on them to complete daily tasks such as, paying bills, transferring money, online shopping and more.
Monzo, Revolut & Starling Bank - These apps are all the buzz right now, making it very easy to open accounts and also offer various perks (depending on the type of account you have). Monzo I typically use for savings and subscription payments because of the round-up feature. Just like Monzo, Revolut and Starling Bank, each allows you to see what you’ve spent, set budgets and saving goals/pots. Starling Bank is particularly cool because it pays [a very small] interest into your account on a monthly basis and has a very nice looking user interface (and debit card).
For an expat like me, Revolut is very useful for international transactions - out of the three apps it’s the only one I can top up with different currencies, at a good rate and with very low fees.
I also use the apps for my accounts with “high street” banks to monitor daily spending, direct debits and so on. With these banks, I've also opted for paperless statements for the sake of being green and going digital.
Investing is my new favourite thing to learn about and for a beginner like me these are the easiest apps I’ve used so far:
FreeTrade: This app is a legit answered prayer. For a long time, I’ve been looking for easy-to-use platforms that teach about investing while investing and I’d find that the sites were full of jargon and/or too expensive to join. Freetrade is the opposite! The founders of FreeTrade were concerned when they realised that a lot of young people either knew very little about investing or wanted to invest but didn’t know how to. They have made it very easy with free sign-up and no fees on buys (depending on the option you select) and they keep adding new stocks to the app for users to choose from, and they send a really cool newsletter every Saturday. Other good things about the app are the notifications for dividend payments, the live chat facilities, being able to make a suggestion and keep track of developments being made to the app. I really am loving this app and I’m excited to see how my investment continues to develop.
Would you like to start investing too? If so I have ONE FreeTrade app invite ticket (UK only). For the fastest person who uses my link, once your registration is complete, we’ll both be given a share each in any company/stock listed on the app. The value of the share can range between £2 and £200 and it’ll take up to 10 working days for the share to show up in your portfolio. In order to obtain the share using the link below and FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY - not following the instructions correctly means neither of us will be given a share.
F R E E T R A D E A P P S H A R E
If you attempt to use the link and it’s not working, it means it has been used (I only have ONE ticket at a time). If you’d still like to sign up please drop me a message using the contact form and I’ll let you know when I’m given another referral link.
MoneyBox: Unlike FreeTrade on this app the investments and trades are done for you by someone else/a firm. You add funds to your MoneyBox account as often as you’d like, which is deducted from your bank account on Wednesday. You can connect your bank accounts to your MoneyBox account to enable the round-up feature - it rounds up your spending to the nearest £1, which you have the option of adding to your MoneyBox account. I joined MoneyBox early this year and it’s been really good to use, I was especially pleased when they introduced the pension transfer feature to the app. In my case I had an old pension account with a provider that didn’t have online capabilities and everything about them was long-winded; with MoneyBox I was able to transfer my old pension to the app and I am able to see exactly how my pension is performing, the only downside is that I can’t deposit into it yet (I believe it’s something they are working on). MoneyBox also has a Junior account/app for children, which is transferred to the child on their 18th birthday (one account per child).
Please note that the app is only available in the UK.
Agropartnerships: A Nigerian based investment platform (app yet to be released) that invests in agriculture with a short cycle investment period. You put money in, it’s invested for anywhere between 4-7 months and you get your money back with interest from sales. For this platform, you need a Nigerian bank account and you need to be quick because investment opportunities sell out fast. The cost of a unit (investment) starts at approx. £200 (for most commodities sold on the site). The Agropartnerships team sends out an email notification when commodities are available for investment and then you can ‘buy’. The dashboard allows you to pre-fund your account so you can purchase your units without any hassle. I really like the company’s ethos, their website and overall user interface on the dashboard.
If investing in Agriculture is something you’re interested in you can sign up on the website and enter the referral code mentioned below when prompted on your sign-up form.
A G R O P A R T N E R S H I P S W E B S I T E
REFERRAL CODE: ola4234
IMPORTANT: Investing is IDEAL for long-term FINANCIAL goals; there are risks involved with investing so be sure to do your research and get advice from a financial advisor/reputable source before you start.
Saving Challenges
Let me start by being very honest about savings challenges - I am yet to successfully complete a challenge, this is why it’s good to have an accountability partner to help you stay on track. In my case I’ve just focused on saving in a different way; if you find saving difficult you may want to start ONE of these challenges. I have included a worksheet for these challenges in the pack.
52-Week Money Challenge: I shared this challenge a while back on dearlayide.com - it is a system that encourages you to save according to week numbers. For example, you save £1 in week one of the year (or whenever you start), then £2 in week two and so on.
26-Week Money Challenge: The 52-week money challenge is completed in half a year same principle but putting aside more money each week.
Save your coins: This is something my parents do, they save/collect their £2 coins. So each time they’re given £2 in change they put it aside in a cash tin. You can also do this with £5. This year I did something similar by saving 5 Dirham notes I received in change and it came in really handy.
Saving challenges are ideal for short-term goals.
Learning
Although I started with Financial Peace University my current go-to learning site is Clever Girl Finance. I thoroughly enjoy using this platform to learn about finance. It is a paid subscription service and it is so worth it. With each completion of a course, I get a digital certificate and the courses are very easy to follow and concise. There are monthly group calls which I can catch up on (due to time differences). Although the site’s content is for an American audience, A LOT of the information is still applicable and it also encourages me to my research on the UK equivalents.
Book: Smart Money Woman - the book that shook all my money tables. It really opened my eyes to the world of personal finance that I had relegated to ‘the future’. It’s a fantastic book and a very easy read. Part two of the book was just released a few weeks ago but is not yet available as an eBook.
Book: Rich Dad Poor Dad - I remember picking up this book once seeing it in my brother’s room; I opened it to browse the first few pages and then I closed it, shaking my head as I put it back where I found it. It seemed like an impossible book to read or understand so I didn’t bother. God is so good though, I’m realising that some things take a while to ‘make sense’. This book is an easy read in some parts, the property sections confused me a lot, but I was able to grasp some of the principles discussed because of the knowledge gained from FPU.
Whatever resource, template, app or book you decide to use to help start your journey, remember it is YOUR journey. The list of things shared are what I’m currently finding or have found good for me to use, and of course, this might change as I learn more about personal finance. Basically, test and see what works for you.
With that being said, don’t forget to download the templates and worksheets.
COMPLETE THE FORM BELOW TO DOWNLOAD THE WORKBOOK.
Next week I’ll be summarising and sharing a review of where I’m at with my wealth goals.
Don’t forget to subscribe to get notified when each post is available; the last wealth post will be out next week Monday at 7pm GMT.
FREETRADE
How to get your free share
Click the referral link from your friend.
Submit your email.
Download the Freetrade app from the App Store or Google Play.
Once you’ve completed account setup, you’ll be guided through a couple of steps:
The W-8BEN form to let you invest in US stocks.
Topping up your account.
Once you’ve topped up and the money has arrived in your account, a mystery share will appear in your Basic Account on your portfolio screen. We’ll grant the share itself in the coming weeks.
How FREETRADE chooseS THE FREE share
Shares are chosen from a selection of around 90 stocks
They’re chosen randomly, WE may not receive the same share. Fun!