Practical guides, African wisdom, and family finance stories for people building a lasting legacy.
If your family owns any business, a duka, a boda fleet, a rental block, a registered company, there is a meeting it is probably not holding. Corporations call it the quarterly business review. Strip away the slide decks...
The belief is usually delivered with a certain pride, and the pride is not misplaced. Pensions, the argument runs, are a Western invention for Western problems: cold societies where old people are parked in homes and...
Turn over a can of Glade or a box of Ziploc bags and you will find four words that no consulting firm would ever have invented: SC Johnson, A Family Company. The company adopted that line as its official tagline in 1998...
Long before any family had a trust deed, a will, or a shilling to put in either, families had a transmission technology that ran entirely on breath: the parent speaking identity and future over the child. The blessing...
This corpus has spent two hundred articles teaching discipline. Emergency floors, sinking funds, pledge policies, succession documents, the slow arithmetic of compounding. If your family has absorbed those lessons,...
Ask an urban African professional over forty where they will be at seventy and most will give you the same answer. Home. The village. The land where their father is buried. It is the default retirement plan of millions...
There is a moment every East African churchgoer knows by heart. The building fund announcement has been made. The treasurer is at the front with a ledger book. Names are being read out, and each name is followed by a...
The belief travels under many accents. In parts of East Africa it is said plainly: a man who writes a will is preparing to die, and preparation is invitation. In West African markets it surfaces as a fear of naming...
A grandchildren pot is a letter to the future. Every deposit is a sentence addressed to a person who may not exist yet, telling them they were expected, planned for, and loved before anyone knew their name.
Nothing leaves with you. Not the land, not the accounts, not the business. The only part of your wealth that travels beyond your life is what you managed to plant in people while you were here.
Helping another family build wealth does not shrink yours. Families who believe otherwise hoard, and hoarding is how communities stay poor together.
Past a certain point, every new shilling of income is a decision you now have to make, and decisions are exactly what rising money multiplies.
A child cannot learn to manage money they do not control. Pocket money that a parent still supervises, rescues, and tops up is not financial training. It is theatre, and children can tell the difference.
Contentment travels with you, not ahead of you. There is no income level, asset count, or finished house at which it is scheduled to arrive, because it was never waiting at any of those addresses.
You track every deposit into your savings. Almost nobody tracks deposits into their children, and those are the ones that compound longest.
Every money goal your family holds is one of two kinds: a dot or a line. A dot serves today, this year, this life. A line serves the family that continues after you. Most families never label which is which, so the dots...
Generous families go broke one specific way: they give away the thing that produces, not the thing it produced.
Generosity and financial freedom are linked. Not loosely, not as a nice sentiment for the offering basket, but as two readings of the same instrument. The percentage of your income that you give away is one of the most...
The most valuable lesson your child's savings jar will ever teach arrives on the day it goes empty, and you do nothing.
Your children are not learning money from your lectures. They are learning it from your behavior, and the two are often teaching opposite lessons.
Your giving has three numbers, and most couples have only ever said the first one out loud. Until all three have been named, you are not making a giving decision. You are repeating a habit and calling it a decision.
Your will should be the most boring document your family ever hears read, because everyone in the room should already know what it says. If the reading of the will contains news, the planning failed while you were still...
Giving that is not planned is giving that mostly does not happen. If generosity lives at the bottom of your money, waiting to see what survives the month, then what you give is whatever the month forgot to take, which...
Money that arrives without a plan gets spent by whoever asks first. If you have not chosen your priorities before payday, payday will choose them for you, and it will choose badly, because it hands the decision to...