Behaviour that is likely to keep you poor in 2013

A couple of weeks ago, a college mate of mine sent through an e-mail showing some of the elements that keep most of us in sustained poverty. I simply loved it and decided to share with the wider readership as we make personal finance resolutions for 2013. I have, through this Column, spent a lot of effort sensitising the masses on these issues and they are so true. Enjoy the read, but more importantly, avoid practising these!

1. Never wake up early: Keep stretching and turning in bed until you get too hungry to continue dozing. If there are no bedbugs, why hurry to get up?

2. Never plan how to spend your money: Whenever you get money, start spending it right away and when it is finished, try to count and recall how you spent it.

3. Don’t think of saving until you have real big money: How can you save when you earn so little? Those telling you to save are not sympathetic to your burning needs.

4. Don’t engage in activities usually reserved for the ‘uneducated’: How can you, a graduate, engage in petty trade or home-based production? That is for people who never went to school.

5. Don’t think of starting a business until an angel comes from heaven and gives you capital: How do they expect you to invest before you get millions of shillings? Even though more than half the businesses in your town were started with a few hundred shillings, you as a smart person can only start with millions.

6. Complain about everything except your own attitude: Blame the system, the government and the banks that refuse to lend you money. They are all bad and do not want you to get rich.

7. Spend more than you earn: To achieve this, buy consumer products in credit and keep borrowing from friends and employer.

8. Compete in dressing: Make sure you wear the latest clothes among all the workers in your office. Whenever your neighbour buys a new phone, get one that is more expensive.

9. Get yourself a nice second- hand car that costs more than three times your gross monthly pay: That will surely keep you in debt long enough to hinder the implementation of any bad plans that could make you accumulate capital.

10. Give your children everything they ask for since you are such a loving parent: They should not struggle for anything because you do not want them to suffer. That way, they will grow up lazy and hence, poor enough to ensure they cannot help you in your old age.

Have a blessed weekend as you think through these 10 rules to poverty—the choice to prosperity in 2013 is yours!