MONEY!!! (Giving, Lending and Borrowing)

Okay!! So it’s my first article and I’m so glad to share a piece of information no matter how cool or ‘uncool’ it turns out to be,lol.

Straight to the subject matter, MONEY. A lot of people shy away from the topic for different reasons: some think it’s ‘unreligious’ lol, others think it makes them appear materialistic, some think they are too poor to be part of the discussion and some others think they’ve not made enough money to discuss money…. There are a whole lot of reasons and I’m sure you have some running through your mind right now. The truth is, at every financial level, you must be faced with either lending, borrowing or giving. Whatever the case may be, kindly read on.

I’ve come to understand that it’s much easier to borrow than it is to pay. I’ll share a short story on that. Nazo is one of those people who naturally possess Largesse, too generous to consider oneself when giving. While in Secondary school she had lots of FFFs like they were called back then (Friends for food, lol). That didn’t change as well when she was an undergraduate as she couldn’t help but assist people as much as she could with the little she had. But she had this friend who borrowed some amount of money from her once and promised to pay back. She didn’t pay till she was in a fix again the next semester: she had family issues and needed assistance with school fees. Now Nazo was at that point where you get to switch off the part of your mind that keeps popping up some important questions like “what about your feeding and transportation?”, “what about the money she has been owing you?”, “are you sure you aren’t under a spell?”, “why won’t you give her half and let her meet other friends for the rest?”…… hmmmm  things we do for friendship. This went on for like 3years, more money was borrowed in bits with excuses, but let me drop you an eye opener here. They had a little misunderstanding once and Nazo received this text message “I know this is because of the money I owe you but Life na turn by turn. I just want you to understand that very soon, I’ll be able to pay back every bit of your money”. Shocked beyond words, She called her friend to apologize and reassured her it had nothing to do with the money as she had kept complaining about issues that made them take their minds off the loan. Her friend got lucky from time to time and received some money from people with which she could pay up (or at least payoff part of the loan) but always had hair, cosmetics and clothes at the upper part of her priority list. It hurt Nazo when she found this out but for the sake of friendship, she saw reasons with her friend when she got the chance to ask questions in that regard. This got to a point where they both couldn’t calculate the amount of money she owed as Nazo only had records of the bulky amounts in her head and couldn’t remember the smaller amounts. As a matter of fact, her friend couldn’t even remember some of the big ones herself, lol. Nazo had one more year to spend after her friend graduated but still hung on to that belief that the said money would come back to her someday, somehow but then…… U can bet she's still waiting and believing (after 3years).

I know some of you see Nazo as ‘stupid’ right now but that’s because you’re the reader. You must have done some stuff sometimes and when you looked back, you asked yourself “WHAAAT!!! Did I really do that?”. From experience, I can tell you that it pays to be good. You’ll get to read more about that in subsequent write-ups but for now, let’s bring this lengthy article to a close.

Away from the story, I would want us to have a few things at the back of our minds when money is involved:

• Never lend an amount of money you can’t dash out.
• Be nice, whether you’re on the giving or receiving end, you never can tell what is going through the other party’s head. 
•  Don’t let people’s behaviour discourage you from being good, it’s a rare gift.
• As a giver, you will always survive. You never can tell how far your giving can take you till you look back at favours you’ve received.
• Try as much as you can to live off borrowing, it pays to have a clean debt record. 
• Whenever you're owing anyone, try as much as possible to pay up as quickly as you can. Put yourself in their shoes, would you permit a 'next time'?
•  And finally, if you keep spending on what you don’t need, someday, you’ll need something you can’t afford.

Feel free to drop a line, I’ll be expecting your comments. Thank youuu.