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If management of your cash flow is the problem, it is wise to discover that more millions may not make you the wealthy millionaire you really want to be.
In a typical Kenyan family, wealth is subconsciously defined by explosive spending behaviors of the family cash flow rather than number of years the family can live on their cash flow from past investment without having to go to work.
The children growing up in such a family pick up from the financial behaviors of their parents and continue the phenomenon through their lives to the next generation. Until sanity checks in, family wealth may be depleted completely. Usually at this point they blame external issues like family curses for their destructive behaviors. However the problem is the small fact that knowledge of wealth and the ability to differentiate it from riches was hidden to these people.
New behaviors
Psychologists put it that we become what we have experienced. This implies that a new you must be born of new behaviors, free of their past order, for certain level of progress to be experienced in your life. The language and real life modeling by important others, which we may not be aware of, cause us to experience our realities of money and wealth that become. Incidentally our children learn from what we do rather what we tell them or would like them to do.
In my view, the failure appears to take root from the deficient definition of wealth by the quantity of money the family is controlling rather than the permanent and effortless flow of cash from the family sources.
Until you can clearly differentiate cash flow from wealth and take control of your cash flow, poverty which resides in your head will remain in your household. One has to find the true beginning of this problem in their lives in order to find a solution for it.
The process of acquiring the world view is personal and goes unnoticed as it is developed in the ordinary course of your relationship with parents and important others. Society behaviors has for example pushed the flashy things such as owning a big home, expensive cars, and other flashy spending as a way of displaying the purported wealth status whether or not the cash flow is permanent or discontinuous.
Toys of heavy spending
People displaying the regular toys of heavy spending and who may genuinely have high incomes are perceived to be wealthy, even when their large cash flow is being directed to waste instead of reinvestment.
Some of our parents have reinforced the message of poverty in their children, by instilling “we cannot afford” mindset which incidentally becomes the world view of their children. For these young people, wealth has been given a new meaning different from the true meaning which is unfortunately hidden to them.
Instead, spend thrifts with or without large cash flow have been associated with wealth. While lack of adequate cash flow to provide for an extra toy has been associated with poverty, the real problem is hidden in their lack of understanding the link between wealth and frugal behaviors.
In the words of Thomas Stanley and William Danko in the “Millionaire Next Door”, the affluent people typically follow a lifestyle conducive for accumulating money. “These people cannot be millionaires! They don’t look like millionaires, they don’t dress like millionaires, they don’t eat like millionaires, they don’t act like millionaires – they don’t even have millionaire names”. They live well below their means. For example they wear inexpensive suits and drive ordinary cars not associated in our societal view with wealth.
The millionaires learnt to take control of their emotions, which have resulted in a strong control of their cash flow throw a frugal financial behaviors. Indeed one of the key findings of the research by Thomas Stanley and William Danko that informed “The Millionaire Next Door” was that most of the wives of the millionaires were planners and meticulous budgeters. Most of the millionaires interviewed thought that their wives were a lot more conservative with money than they were.
Money is a very powerful tool. If you use it well it will make you rich. If you do not use it well it will make you very poor. Financially intelligent people can turn any amount of seed money into streams of wealth to meet the needs of several generations.
You may have seen many people win millions in ruffles and return back to absolute poverty, usually much worse than they were before they won the million because more money does not make you rich, if cash flow management is the problem.
Be a winner. Find the true meaning or money wealth and make it your reality.
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