Dr Charles Barugahare, the author of the path-breaking book The 9-pillars to Exploit your Potential, is an expert on personal finance and retirement planning.
In his latest book, Navigating the Financial Path: The 30-Day Personal Finance Improvement Challenge, he offers the reader rich insights on financial discipline that are just what the doctor ordered, pun unintended.
“Are you ready to make improvements in your financial life? What does it mean and require to make the desired changes?” he asks.
If, like one third of humankind, as noted by the author, you are often thrown into bouts of puzzlement regarding how to foreshorten the inevitability of your expenses rising to reflect your income; pull up a chair and stay a while. The good doctor has the magic potion to cure your financial commotion.
He highlights two important keys that can literally turn your fortunes around. And thus empower you to “attract, effectively use, grow, and protect your finances.”
Key Number 1 is financial education and key number 2 is taking action.
If you know how to leverage the knowledge of how finances work and thereby use your finances well, this knowledge can be applied by taking the appropriate financial actions.
To be sure, all knowledge becomes a dead letter if it is not set in motion by our actions. Or, as American author and coach Tim Robbins says, “If there is no action, you haven’t truly decided.”
To help you decide, the author has written a simplified book which is divided into three modules and 30 brief chapters.
Module 1: The Basic Finance Fundamentals (BFF) covering Day 1 to Day 8. These shine a searchlight on what might be stunting your financial growth and offer solutions thereto.
Module 2: The Finance Action Path (FAP) covering Day 9 to Day 24. This one is embracive of the implementation stage. This way you not only walk the talk; you run your financial prospects across the length of an expanded bottom line.
Module 3: Review and Reinforcement (RR) covering day 25 to day 30. This will ensure that your personal finance improvement journey is paved by the momentum to keep your financial growth on track.
To be able to get the best out of this challenge, you have to elevate the best version of yourself head and shoulders above the other versions of yourself.
This simply means that if you like to “play small”, as the author says, because you think your lot in life is punctuated by financial limitations, you must expect better.
A scarcity mentality, the author advises, must be replaced by an abundance mentality in view of there being room at the top of the financial pyramid for us all.
If you have suffered financial setbacks, you will be well served by adopting the “Wedge Principle” in order to drive a wedge between your income and expenses growing correspondingly.
The author guides us on how we can turn our finances into Midas Gold, so to speak, by learning how money works.
“There are four (4) essential elements of money, namely; earning, spending, saving, and investing. Understanding how these elements are interconnected influences how you learn and take action about your finances,” he writes.
How well you manage these elements translates into how well you learn how money works.
That’s because money is called currency whose root word is current---the flow of electric charge through a conductor---understanding how money works and appreciating where it comes from will make you a better conductor of money.
So you must play to your strengths, be they intellectual or others, and accept that no matter what you earn, you can attract, grow and protect your finances as you parlay them into generational wealth.
Accordingly, “beware of the little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.”
The analogy of a ship is rather apt as the word “ship” serves as the last four letters in the word “receivership.”
Wordplay aside, this advice ties in well with his tips towards better financial discipline which demand that you set small but consistent financial actions, that you never allow your environment to shape your financial behavior and that you make your financial discipline satisfying by celebrating every victory in this direction.
This book carries such a wealth of knowledge and advice that I was moved to take the 30-day personal finance improvement challenge. If you do too, we can compare notes at the end of a potentially bountiful month.
Author: Dr Charles Barugahare
Title: The 9-pillars to Exploit your Potential
Price: Shs40,000
Published: 2024
Pages: 181
Available: www.financelip.org
