A wild goat was blind in one eye due to an accident as a child. Since it was vulnerable if a predator approached from its blind side, it got used to grazing on a high cliff facing the sea. He kept his good eye in the direction of the land for enemies and his blind eye toward the ocean.

One day a boat full of sailors rowed over the cliff. A sailor saw the goat, grabbed a bow and shot it. As the goat lay dying, he gasped, “I thought my enemies would come by land. I never thought to look out to sea.”

Wealth is only guaranteed when your personal money machine is comprised of an effective money generation and retention system. A flaw in any of these systems leaves you vulnerable to poverty and financial failure. Unfortunately, most people trying to make money often focus all of their efforts on making money with little or no attention to controlling the money. This is like trying to save the life of a car accident victim by doing everything you can to get him to the hospital without stopping the flow of blood to her body. The truth is that he is likely to die faster due to blood loss than due to the injury sustained. It will remain poor more as a result of a lack of money control skills than a lack of money making skills. This is true for both individuals and organizations.

Think of it this way, every time you save $100, you are automatically $100 richer. But every time you need to earn $100, you’ll need to spend some money on others to do so, sometimes as much as $80. So avoiding losing $100 could be equivalent to earning $500 or more. Therefore, the first and most important skill of lasting prosperity is the ability to retain money.

6 Key Symptoms of Chronic Lack of Money Control

If you ask most people if they are good at controlling money, their answers will be a resounding yes. But this approach will give you the kind of result you’ll get if you ask kids if eating ice cream is good for their health. The best way to tell if you have a money control problem is to answer the five questions below as honestly as possible with a yes or no. No one else needs to know what your answers are, but being true to yourself will set you on the path to lasting prosperity.

1. Do you regularly find yourself in short-term and long-term non-business debt? For example, you always have to borrow money or apply for a promissory note before the end of the month
2. Do you find yourself borrowing money from people who earn less than you? For example, non-working subordinates or parents
3. Do you find yourself habitually involved in regret expenses? These are expenses you incurred and wish you had delayed for larger expenses
4. Do you find yourself habitually involved in emotional shopping or spending? Buy things or spend money not because you need it but because of what people will say.
5. Do you regularly find yourself unable to meet expected and predictable bulk expenses such as: children’s school fees, maternity bills, house rents, major car repairs?
6. Do you regularly find yourself dreaming of a jackpot or sudden financial breakthrough and therefore frequently participate in different types of lottery or lucky games?

If you answered yes to only 2 of the questions above, you have money control problems. If your answer to 3 or more is yes, your money control problem needs urgent and immediate attention. But don’t panic. You just have to be aware of some money control laws and start obeying them.

money control laws

Law #1 – Law of Financial Entropy

Your money and financial life will continue to be in a state of disorder unless you apply conscious force or influence to put it in a state of order and keep it there..

That means money can’t just pile up in your bank account without you applying the discipline of saving. It also means that you’ll never suddenly find that you have money left on your hands at the end of the month unless you make a conscious effort to keep something, regardless of how much you earn. You see, the force that tries to take money from your hands has to be stopped by the force of your will and desire to be prosperous. Financial prosperity or poverty is like a physical building, when completed it looks big and intimidating; but it usually starts with invisible foundations, sand, concrete, blocks and cements. Just as a building will never be completed by accident, your financial success will not happen by accident. It will only be established and sustained through awareness and application of relevant financial laws, actions and habits.

Law #2 – Law of Financial Goals

You can’t achieve and maintain a money goal you never set for yourself.

You can’t get to a financial bus station you never thought or decided to go to. Nobody wakes up in the morning; take public transportation and tell the driver to take you to a popular bus station called “No Where”. But that’s what people try to do when they want to have money without having a specific and defined money goal. If you aim at nothing, you will surely hit nothing. If you don’t have a clearly defined and well-documented money goal for a given period of time, you should be happy that you don’t have money, because that’s what you wanted.

Research results in the Psychology of Achievement reveal that less than 3% of the average population of people have clearly written goals and 100% of successful leaders anywhere in the world have clearly written goals that they often carry with them on a regular basis. . Ask yourself these questions: Exactly how much do you want to earn in 2 years, 5 years, and 10 years? What kind of information, skills, expertise, experience do I need to have to earn this amount of money? Who are the people currently making this kind of money legally, and how can I access the information, skills, knowledge, experience, and strategies they have? Providing honest, detailed, written answers to these questions will produce effective money goals and a clear roadmap to your financial destiny.

Law #3 – Law of Potential

The financial value of a common expense is not as important as its potential financial consequence.

You can also state this law like this: “the size of a car is not as important as the speed at which it moves.” Many people habitually spend their money on seemingly small and inconsequential expenses and assume that the amount of money involved in such expenses cannot negatively affect their financial prosperity. Well, when you focus on the impact of a single transaction, that may be true, but when you factor in the frequency of such spending and the exponential effect of its addictive influence on your long-term financial goals, you may find that it’s huge. Try this experiment on your spending and see the kind of impact we’re talking about. Take a sheet of paper and write down how much you spend weekly on things like: non-alcoholic beverages, beer, pepper soup, fast food, entertainment CDs/VCDs, and non-business phone calls, etc. Add up the amount in Naira and multiply it by 52 (weeks in a year) and see how much you have.

For a person who spends just $20 on non-business calls, $40 on fast food, and $20 on alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages every day for 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year, the cumulative spend amounts to about $20 880.00. But that’s not even the actual consequence we’re talking about. Imagine that instead of spending that money, you consistently set it aside each year and put that $20,800.00 into a business or investment that returns 15% per year. In 10 years the money would have become $423,941.65 and in 20 years it would have grown to $1,797,288.74. Talk about potential! Again, the moral lesson here is not to avoid these expenses altogether, but to become aware of careless indulgences and the potential we have to put our hard-earned money to productive use.

Law #4 – Parkinson’s Law

Expenses expand to cover available money

The more you earn, the more you want to spend. The higher your income, the higher the standard of living you want to adjust to. Have you ever noticed that when your income increases, you often get irritated with things you used to enjoy? For example, if you used to enjoy watching your 14″ flat screen TV when your monthly income is only $5000.00. When you accept a promotion or a new job that pays $25,000.00, you will suddenly be interested in a 28″ flat screen TV. , along with high-end cable network, and exotic sound accessories. In fact, you may suddenly find that you need to change both the quality of your furniture and the location of your accommodation. You will continue to adjust to your new income level until you realize that money is not enough after all.

The truth is that saving and investing will never happen just because you make more money. Your financial behavior is determined by your subconscious financial model. If the dominant thought pattern in your financial operating system is consumption, all of your financial behaviors will be consumption oriented regardless of how much money you make. If you have no savings with an income of $1000.00 per month, you will have no savings with an income of $50,000.00 per month. Increasing income without changing economic habits is like trying to have a different image by enlarging the negative of the same photograph.