By Aniekeme Finbarr
Never mind that people are wearing new cloths and keeping smiling faces, the economy is fluctuating. That means you should make tactical adjustments to your lifestyle. You may wish to do the following:
1. If you are a job seeker, please take the next available job even if it is below your dream job. Survive first. Kpong asian!
2. Buy only items that are considered as necessities. Postpone all luxurious articles till later dates. Who luxury item epp?
3. Forget about living life to satisfy others’ expectation at the expense of your purse, income or convenience. Are people still living for show again? Don’t allow people’s selfies deceive, everybody get him own code.
4. Avert taking unnecessary risk in your place of work or business that has the possibility of making you lose your job or major client. Be careful.
5. Be committed to your profession, job or business more than ever before. Work hard. God himself is a worker, na your work e go carry bless you. Change church, if your Pastor is not preaching this.
6. Re-evaluate your recurrent expenditure pattern like children school fees and effect necessary changes if found beyond your income line. No time to impress people. Change school where necessary.
7. If you are blessed with many cars, try and use those with less fuel consumption capacity. You may have to combine outings instead of members of the family taking different cars out for joint outings. Forget convoy, you are not a corpse.
8. Except you can afford it, resist all Aso Ebi or colour of the day clothes made mandatory by a person inviting you to a ceremony. Nobody will prevent you from entering the venue even with the odd dress.
9. Avoid social functions that will tell terribly on your finances in terms of distance and the content of the Programme. Why not just send ‘envelope’ to the organizers instead.
10. Let those asking you for money know that things are no longer the same: stop pretending at your expense. Stop suffering in silence. When the chips are down, you will be alone.
11. Notwithstanding any promise to the contrary, avoid lending money to anyone an amount which if you don’t receive on time will hurt your financial stability. Many friendly loans will be irrecoverable now as many expectation will be dashed. No be dem do am, isong ifonno.
12. If you are a tenant living in a rented palatial apartment with many rooms left unutilized, it is high time you got a smaller accommodation.
13. Where the house is yours and most of your children are adults leaving you and your spouse in a big apartment with less than half of the house being utilized, quickly consider modifying the house into smaller units with the possibility of earning rental income.
14. Plan only on funds at hand, avoid permutations based on promise made by others. In a time like this, the promisor may fail.
15. Where it is possible, talk things over on phone with people rather than putting your car on the road for physical meeting. In addition avoid endless fruitless banters on phone, one hour on a useless gossip is a useless conversation. Be conscious of the call card cost and data usage.
16. If you have a large retinue of hangers-on around you, reduce the frequencies of meals and costly drinks.
17. Shut all lights that are not required in your house to minimize the energy bills.
18. Do more physical exercises to minimize constant requirement of drugs. Learn to trek short distances, it helps to improve your health and relieve you of avoidable small expenses.
19. If the regular food in your house is becoming dearer look for alternative. For instance yam is a substitute for bread in the morning.
20. If you will bear heavy responsibility in an event, insist on a moderate estimation in line with the amount you can afford, you could save some finances.
21. For women, don’t follow your friends, whether married or single to spend recklessly, everybody get their own map or key and they won’t tell you o.
22. For men, don’t let women play tricks on your ego, don’t veer off the plan, plan your finances above the neck region, not below the waist line.
23. For politicians, don’t allow people trick you to contest unnecessary election in 2022-2023. Anyone asking you to contest, should bring money first.
• Finbarr is a journalist and public speaker.