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Zainab Onuh-Yahaya
In the early years of our life together, my mother had a tradition of eating what we jokingly referred to as "the last supper." Normal dinner time was 6pm, so she always saved a portion of this early dinner so she could eat it while watching her favorite shows beginning at 9pm.
Interestingly, this last supper almost never got eaten because my tired mother fell asleep immediately after sitting in front of the TV. And because she does not eat stale food, the last supper passed on to me, who was only too happy to eat it the next morning.
On one of those mornings, I asked my mother why she consistently saved this dinner even though she never got around to eating it. She shrugged.
"One day, I'll stay up late and I would be glad I did," she said.
I didn't get it then. I still don't.
My mother saved everything this way — clothes and jewelry for a special occasion, experiences, money.
When I was 10, we had a Mother's Day project that asked us to say what our favorite thing was about our mother. My mother had many great qualities, but for 10-year-old me, her superpower was the ability to stretch every penny.
In theory, we did not have much, but my mother made it quite impossible for little me to tell. Money always miraculously appeared just at the time we needed it most.
Almost 20 years later, I would come to understand that it wasn't a miracle. It was simply saving, a concept my mother believed in, and lived strongly by. Her financial plan consisted of one large column of putting money away for a future that almost never came to pass.
The older I grew, the more I drifted from my mother's relationship with money — and its attending paranoia. Unlike my mother, I do not see money as an end itself, or as a thing that is more valuable when it is stashed away. My views on money have become much more flexible, transactional — a valuable resource that is a means to an end.
My mother never bought anything unless she could afford to buy it twice or even thrice over. And when I began my financial journey after university, I tried to emulate this financial strategy. But the 2020s are wildly different from 20 years earlier.
In 2021, I wanted to purchase a computer I liked and could afford at the time. But I didn't have enough to buy it twice over. A month later, when I could, the naira had weakened against the dollar and the price of the computer in my local currency had doubled.
I eventually bought that computer in 2022, at almost triple the price as the naira weakened even further. I bought it at an incredibly ridiculous loss. That, more than anything, taught me all I needed to know about inflation, the value of money, and the foolishness of leaving money lying dormant if you have no immediate need for it.
So I expanded my financial column, which had previously mirrored my mother's. Now, when I am not saving towards a specific goal, I stash money away in stable investment plans where it is not subject to the whims of inflation and crashing currencies And because my risk appetite, very much like my mother's, is low, I save by purchasing items like jewelry that can easily be converted into cash if the need arises.
I no longer believe in the concept of saving that my mother has lived by her whole life because of the possibility of a loss in the value of whatever sum you have saved when currencies go on a market downslide and inflation crops up. It's a phenomenon I describe to my mother as hustling backwards — by the time you get around to spending your saved money, you are probably unable to afford the things you could have when you started, leaving you worse off.
I no longer interact with money from a place of fear and am not desperately putting money away for a hypothetical rainy day. What I am doing instead is utilizing my money in ways that increase the quality of my life, and building a solid income and expenditure plan that ensures I am well-prepared for an emergency.
Also, I have mentally come to terms with the unpredictability of life, which makes it impossible to tell if the rainy day you are desperately saving for is a drizzle that would only slightly drench you, or a storm that could drown you.
