By John Michael Ojo

The Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, Olayemi Cardoso, during the MPC meeting on Tuesday revealed that mobile money operators who are currently being restricted from enrolling new customers would soon be allowed to carry our their operations without any form of restrictions in the next few months.

Cardoso who stated this in Abuja, denied revolking the licences of these fintech companies.

The CBN Governor, claimed that the Central Bank was working round the clock by engaging with stakeholders in order to strengthen the activities of Fintech companies in the country.

He added that the CBN is also working to mitigate against every loophole used by criminal elements to facilitate money laundering within the financial system while maintaining the integrity of the industry.

“I am confident that as time goes on, and hopefully in another couple of months, all these will be something of the past and then you will see that sector going back into what they’ve been known to do before, but certainly with a very stronger regulatory framework,” he said.

Cardoso through the CNB in April placed an embargo on Opay, Palmpay, Kuda Bank, Moniepoint and other fintech companies from onboarding new customers, a move which was heavily criticized and seen as a gag on the financial sub-sector.

However, the CBN Governor who has now provided the public with more details about the action of the apex bank on the fintech companies said: “The fintechs have not been singled out for any exceptional kind of treatment. The CBN remains proud of the exploits of fintech firms in the last number of years and the apex bank will continue to support and strengthen them.

“However, regulation is very critical in a sector that seems to have grown so incredibly rapidly.

“More recently, we had the cause to take a deep dive look at the whole issue of illicit flows and money laundering particularly within the non-heavily regulated banking system and we all know some of the issues that came out with cryptos and some of the messages we put out after that, which of course gave us some cause to know that there is the need for heightened surveillance,” Cardoso stated.

  By Grace Agada

There are only three kinds of life you can have at the end of your active career life. The first and most common is the low-quality life. You create this life when you retire to passive income that is less than the income that currently sustains you. The second is the same quality life. You create this life when you maintain the same quality of life by retiring to passive income that is worth the same income that sustains you now. And the third is the wealthy retirement life. This is where you create a life in retirement that is bigger and better than your active career life. Assuming you are to choose from these three lives, which of them would give you a restful retirement life? Which would make you an asset in retirement and which will make you a liability? The answer is for you to decide. But if you are ever going to maintain the same quality of life as you do now in retirement you must create passive income that is at least the same size as your current income package. Failure to achieve this is what makes people suffer from the financial disease I call “The Rich Dad, Poor Dad, The Same Dad Syndrome” – a disease condition where children watch their dads move from a rich and admirable lifestyle to a poor and deplorable lifestyle within the same lifetime. If you must escape this disease, you must stop doing what the middle-class do with their money and start doing what the upper class do with their income.

What the Middle and Upper-Class do with Income

One of the big differences between the middle and upper classes is what they do with their income. No income is stationary so when you earn income you must use it. But how you use your income will determine where you end up in retirement. When the middle class earn income, they convert most of it into riches. They buy income- consuming rich symbols like the latest car, a luxury home, expensive gadgets and pay expensive school fees. All these make them appear rich but in truth they are poor people with a temporary high income paycheck most of whom can go broke in 60 days without income. Building and maintaining a rich lifestyle cost money and is an income-consuming activity. Thus, at the end of a 30-year high income career, the middle-class end up with memories of their high income paycheck long spent, money they cannot account for and rich symbols that are liabilities rather than assets. The biggest mistake the middle class make is that they fail to create the source of their riches – the stable income. And because their riches must be sustained by earned income, they keep working to earn the next paycheck. Unfortunately, the retirement clock stops ticking, and when it’s time 80% of them take a deep dive downward.

The upper-class use their income differently. They convert most of their earned income into wealth. Wealth is different from riches in that wealth is primarily derived from what you own and control and not what you do. What you do gives you earned income. Earned income gets spent and is 100% mobile. Wealth is more stable and permanent. Thus, if your livelihood is primarily derived from earned income you will have to keep working to sustain it. Thankfully, the upper-class solve this problem. To cancel the need for ongoing work, the upper-class use their earned income to create and buy income-producing assets that produce both present and future incomes. And then use that income to create their rich lifestyle. Since they own and control their own income producing assets (wealth), retirement is no longer a threat to them.

READ ALSO: How To Create Your Own Personal Prosperity This Year (2)

So how do you create your own wealth and enjoy a restful retirement life?

To create your own wealth, you need to do three things.

The first is to own your own passive income-producing assets. The second is for your assets to produce the size of passive income that can give you self-sufficiency in retirement. And the third is for your passive income to maintain its value throughout retirement and preserve your purchasing power.

 Owning Your Own Passive Income Producing Assets

All investment assets produce some level of passive income, but not all assets produce the kind and size of passive income that can sustain you in retirement. The only asset that fits as a retirement income producer are those assets that have the advantages that your current income has, but not the disadvantages. All income sources have advantages and disadvantages and your goal is to end up with a retirement income that carries more advantages. For example, your salary is regular, safe, consistent, and readily available in cash at the end of the month – that is its advantage. But its disadvantage is that it requires hard labor, only reaches its peak after sacrificing your youthful life, it is difficult to multiply without multiplying your back-breaking workload and it has an expiry date. To choose a suitable retirement income source you need assets that carry the advantages salary carries without the disadvantages. The correct asset class must have some of what I call the perfect retirement income attributes. It must produce both present and future income and must last for a lifetime. It must be 100% passive and must not require ongoing work, maintenance or further investment once matured. It must be difficult to lose and free from market fluctuation and volatility. It must be liquid in nature and easily accessible when needed – your life runs on liquid cash and not assets. And it must have the capacity to produce passive income that can give you self-sufficiency. The more stable, and guaranteed your passive income the more restful your retirement life will be.

Achieving Self-sufficiency in Retirement

Not all sizes of income can give you self-sufficiency in retirement. You achieve self-sufficiency when you have passive income that can pay your bills, take care for your loved ones, help you pursue your dreams and goals and engage in charitable activities. Any size of income that prevents you from doing these is insufficient. Thus, owning passive income-producing assets alone is not the answer. The key is to own assets that can produce the size of passive income that can give you financial freedom. The closest size of income that can give you financial freedom is the income that is currently sustaining your life. The even better size is income that can give you the boldness to hands off your current job without financial fears. To build this size of passive income you must save big, make your savings fail proof and convert your savings to income producing assets and not riches. You must also resolve to stick to a zero-lose investment strategy – where you can have a consistent uninterrupted progress and where your investing success cannot be undone. The truth is without self-sufficiency you will become a liability in retirement.

READ ALSO: How To Create Your Own Personal Prosperity This Year (1)

Protecting the Value of Your Income and Purchasing Power

The income that you earn today has a high value in today’s market and would be sufficient for you for the first few years of retirement. But earning today’s income 10 or 15 years from now is a disaster. Your income will lose its value and you will gently slip from an independent person to a dependent person. Thus, achieving self-sufficiency might be a great start but what is even greater is maintaining your self-sufficiency throughout retirement. To maintain your self-sufficiency throughout retirement you must create a system that regularly or occasionally infuses and increases your main income.  Constantly increasing your income in ways that keep you ahead of the market is the most effective way to preserve your purchasing power in retirement.

If you want to have a restful retirement life and want to know how to carry your current income into retirement, we can help you. Send an email to info@createsolidwealth.com

About the Author

Grace Agada is the most sought-after financial freedom expert in Nigeria. She is a renowned author, financial freedom advisor and keynote speaker. Agada is popularly known as the Queen of Financial Freedom, the Breadwinner’s Advocate and the Middle-Class to Upper-Class Mentor. Her goal is to help working professionals and breadwinners move their success and livelihood from a paycheck to their own solid passive income sources. Agada  is the author of three books and possibly the most widely read financial articles. Her articles are spread across seven national newspapers and four of the most popular Nigerian blogs. Agada is also the Founder of the University of Wealth, the Rich Retirement Life Quarterly Publication, the Wealth Creator Quarterly Report, and the Wealthy Business Blueprint Programme. Agada has been featured on BBC Africa, Business Day TV, Inspiration FM and inside Naijatv. And she consults for numerous top organizations, company directors, CEOs, c-suite executives, and high-income professionals. To connect with Agada, send an email to info@createsolidwealth.com

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By

Grace Agada

 As far as this world is concerned, the only prosperity that truly benefits you is your personal prosperity. You achieve personal prosperity, when you convert a part of the global wealth into your own personal wealth. To do this you need two things – advantages and opportunities. Your advantages are what you must bring into the year to make that year prosperous for you while opportunities are what the year must offer you to enable you  to create wealth in that year. This means that in any given year, there is no pre-existing wealth waiting for you. What you have are potential opportunities which you must then convert to wealth using your advantages. Unfortunately, not many know how to convert opportunities into wealth. While the year comes full with numerous opportunities, only a few can convert those opportunities into wealth. But unless you learn how to identify and convert the opportunities within the year using what you have, prosperity will elude you. In Part 1 of this article, we discussed the nine advantages that you must have to leverage the opportunities this year. In this article we will discuss the other three factors that can affect your prosperity this year. The first of them is your disadvantages and the limitations that you bring into the year. The second is the kind of opportunities that a year offers and whether you can convert them into wealth. And the third is how you live within a year and whether that life increases or decreases your disadvantages. So, without further ado let’s look at each of these factors and how they can affect you this year.

READ ALSO: How To Create Your Own Personal Prosperity This Year (1)

The Disadvantages And Limitations That You Bring Into The Year

Disadvantages are factors that reduces your chances of success within a given year while limitations are the obstacles you must overcome to make progress each year. While limitations are inevitable and are present in your life until you achieve all your goals, disadvantages are avoidable and should be eliminated or reduced within the year. Some of the common disadvantages that can reduce your chances of success are having a high maintenance lifestyle, making poor health choices, making dangerous investment decisions, increasing your financial load and wealth-inhibiting or -draining relationships, poor savings culture, and debt . The most beneficial thing to do to your disadvantages is to eliminate them. To do this you need to grow in knowledge and develop a more disciplined and accountable lifestyle. While everyone can claim to have discipline, only a few have discipline in areas that can create wealth for them. Most people have discipline in areas that increase their liabilities and expenses. Thus, to create wealth and prosperity this year you must develop discipline in areas that matter to wealth.

Your limitations can also hold you back from achieving success this year. Some of the common ones include a low or single income,  job-based or low-income skills, lack of wealth creating relationships, lack of a wealthy mindset, lack of purpose and a clear life direction, lack of the right mentorship and accountability partners etc. The only way to overcome your limitations is to develop new and advanced knowledge and to discipline yourself to apply that knowledge. The best way to upgrade your knowledge this year is through reading, positive exposures, positive relationships or mentorship etc. This means that to create wealth this year you must push yourself outside your comfort zone. Doing what you have always done will only give you the results you already have. To get  different and better results you must do the things that your next level of success requires you to do.

The Opportunities That Exist In  A Year

Every year brings with it two kinds of opportunities. The first is the opportunity to make money and the second is the opportunity to lose money. Everyone must choose within the year where they belong. The dilemma is the same opportunity can make money for one person and lose money for the other person. This means that what truly counts within the year are not the opportunities themselves but whether you can leverage them to create wealth for yourself without losing money. Many increase their chances of losing money by coming into the year with unrefined and low quality advantages. Only a few people enter the year with refined advantages that increase their chances of creating wealth. Thus, if all you bring into the year is ignorance in wealth creating matters, low-income skills, poor relationships, low savings culture and so on you will end the year on the side of those that lose money. If, however, you bring in better quality advantages you will end up with more prosperity. Thus, what will create your financial miracles this year has a lot to do with you than the society, your employer or any other person for that matter.

READ ALSO: How To End Up In A Better Place Than Your Parents At the end of Your Career (2)

How You Increase Your Disadvantages

There is a significant difference between the advantages and disadvantages that you begin with at the start of the year and what you exit with at the end of the year. This means that during the course of the year you affect your advantages and disadvantages. The challenge is most people do not know how they affect their disadvantages and what they do to reduce their odds. Thus, during the course of the year most people lose their advantages and increase their disadvantages. To succeed this year, you must know how you increase your disadvantages or the things that can reduce your odds of success. There are three things that can increase your disadvantages. The first is financial ignorance. Financial ignorance is the absence of the knowledge that you need to create the financial results that you desire. And there are three types of ignorance. The first is zero knowledge – no one has absolute zero knowledge, but you can have zero knowledge in a particular area of your financial life. The second is wrong knowledge – the more wrong knowledge you have and apply within the year the more disadvantages you will create. The third and most dangerous is the right but unapplied knowledge. Most people know what to do, it is the ability to apply that knowledge that is the problem. The more unapplied knowledge you have, the more disadvantages you will create this year.

The second is relationships. The wrong relationships can increase your disadvantages. And there are two types of wrong relationships. The first are parasitic relationships – that is relationships that drain your income. And the second are wealth inhibitive relationships,  that is relationships that have negative and anti-wealth influences on you. If you hang around the wrong people, you will increase your disadvantages this year.

The third is self-discipline and accountability. You can achieve any goal that you set for yourself if you have the discipline to pay the price. Self-discipline is the ability to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not. And the most successful people in the world all live self-disciplined life. But if self-discipline is not working for you the next best thing to do is to submit yourself for accountability. Accountability is choosing an external source of discipline when self-discipline is not giving you the desired results. Thus, the key to reducing your disadvantages this year is to reduce your ignorance, elevate your relationships and increase your discipline and accountability

If you need creating more prosperity in your life this year we can help you. Send an email to info@createsolidwealth.com

About The Author

Grace Agada is the most sought-after financial freedom expert in Nigeria. She is a renowned author, financial freedom advisor and keynote speaker. Agada is popularly known as the Queen of Financial Freedom, the Breadwinner’s Advocate and the Middle-Class to Upper-Class Mentor. Her goal is to help working professionals and breadwinners move their success and livelihood from a paycheck to their own solid passive income. Agada is the author of three books and possibly the most widely read financial articles. Her articles are spread across seven national newspapers and four of the most popular Nigerian blogs. Agada  is also the Founder of the University of Wealth, the Rich Retirement Life Quarterly Publication, the Wealth Creator Quarterly Report, and the Wealthy Business Blueprint Program. Agada has been featured on BBC Africa, Business Day TV, Inspiration FM and inside Naijatv. And she consults for numerous top organizations, company directors, CEOs, C-Suite executives, and high-income professionals. To connect with Agada, send an email to info@createsolidwealth.com