THE SMART MONEY WOMAN - Broke

Hello friends!

• What broke really means!
  Broke means, if you lost your primary
  source of income today, you wouldn't be
  able to maintain the lifestyle you have
  become accustomed to because you have no
  assets to rely on. Like Zuri, many people
  have built expensive lives they can't sustain
  because they continuously spend everything
  they earn and as such, have a revolving door for their money.

Image credited

I can't believe this is happening to me! Zuri panicked as she shook her head and stared at her account balance. It was the middle of the month and she had a little over eighty thousand left in her bank. To be fair, this would seem like a lot to some, but her expenses told a different
story. This balance would barely make a dent in the bills she had piled up, and she wasn't expecting any new funds till the end of the month. Even then, she wouldn't be able to cover the bills that had just arrived.

Image credited

She stared hopelessly at the papers in front of her. A bill from her mechanic for what she thought were minor repairs had ballooned to two hundred thousand. Her car was now stuck at his workshop until she was able to
make payment. There was a letter from her landlord pointing out her service charge bills for the last three months—four hundred and thirty thousand naira in total —were unpaid, and he was threatening to cut her off if payments wasn't made by the end of the month. She had
just visited her gynaecologist for a routine check-up, only to discover that she had fibroids. The procedure Dr Emeka had told her she might need would cost nine hundred and fifty thousand, and her HMO had just written to inform her that her plan did not cover it. Dr
Emeka was the best, and sometimes the best cost a lot.

Image credited

She did the math and it didn't add up. She earned six hundred thousand a month after taxes from her job as a senior manager at Richmond Developments, a real estate firm. Until this moment, she had considered herself very lucky. She had a great job that paid well. She lived in an upmarket part of Lagos in Lekki Phase I, in a two-bedroom serviced apartment that overlooked the water. She drove a second-hand Mercedes ML 500, and it was awesome—until the engine started acting up. She could take one or two trips abroad a year to destinations like Dubai, New York or London. To her, that was the ideal life of a single, über-successful twenty-eight-year-old African woman.

Image credited

So how could she explain to anyone that she was flat broke? She still couldn't understand it herself. She wasn't overly extravagant. Yes, she liked the good life, but she wouldn't consider herself one of those people living beyond their means. In fact, she hated that term. She could just hear Aunty Iyabo's voice in her head saying, 'You young people of nowadays, your eyes are too big!' She always rolled her eyes when she heard that. The fact is, old people didn't understand. If you worked hard, you deserved to play hard. YOLO! You only live once, abi? As long as you were smart enough to earn a living and keep making more money, being poor was
not your portion, IJN.

Image credited

Except now, Zuri could see that some savings would have come in handy to take care of the financial black hole laid out in front of her. She worked hard so she could one day enjoy the lifestyle she had always desired—living comfortably in the best part of town, neve having to worry about bills, a designer wardrobe that would rival fashion icon Toke Makinwa, shopping trips to Paris and month-long summers in the South of France. To her, that was the ideal life. It wasn't like she expected to own a home or anything at
this point in her life; that, was the responsibility of her future husband. Still, she had no land, no stock portfolio, or anything else that had real value to speak of. There were no assets she could sell to keep her head above water.

TO BE CONTINUED