With personal financial management and retirement planning lets separate the two. It’s quite interesting that I should be talking about personal financial management because of cause like many people of my age when you tell young people how poor we were they think we were suffering, we were very poor but we never suffered. So although we were poor by Ghanaians standards, we didn’t have the sense of poverty as such the only thing that made me feel a little bit unhappy was not poverty but discrimination because my father was a polygamist and so he didn’t like my mother because she had seven boys and no girls. He economically discriminated against for example most of the time he pays my school fees which was very small and sometimes he didn’t give my mother money. Later on I discovered that my mother was very intelligent her IQ was very high and is quite obvious that since she has boys, boys inherit more intelligence from their mother than their father.

Though she was not the beloved wife she struggled to be there. When I went to training college I didn’t have a shoe and I had to take my elder brother’s shoe, he was a pupil teacher and was even taller than me. In fact I wore it for only one day because of the blisters on my leg. We started getting money from the allowances so therefore we could take care of our basic needs until they cancelled our allowances. I must accept that when I was in the training college when I got the allowance I used most of it in doing corresponding courses to get my ‘O’ level and ‘A’ level into the university.

when I was in the university my first year as a Christian, one of the things we use to do was to go and visit people secretly at Legon hospital and there was a woman who had an operation and was very sick at a point of death and we will go there or go by her bed to pray for her as part of our Christian duties. Fortunately she pulled through and then when I go we will have an ordinary chat before I pray with her so I went one day and she asked me “son, are u in Trinity College?” She was quite educated though but she shouted “aah!, then your wife is going to suffer”. So when I was leaving the place I said lord if u make me an economist I will not like money to dominate my life nor will I like to fight for money, I will not give the devil the chance to say that money is my God Jesus. So that was the commitment I made to the lord in the end if I tell you how much money I have lost or given out to the lord it is probably at least 50% but now I spent more than 50% on my family. I didn’t want money without commitment apart from the church so I gave it out in helping other people so actually even when I was in United Nations at the age of 46 practically I had no savings.

People write to me for the media to help them and I do help them and of course they take advantage as my wife will pray about it. An insurance agent once tried to sell me some insurance government policy he almost convinced me to sign but I said I wanted to go through so he should leave the papers but he got angry threw some of the papers there and never came back it was very unusual. For me it was a shock but among the papers he left behind was one by Williams actually on financial management so I had been reading it and books on basic financial principles, how to save, how to invest and definitely I knew that God was using the book to teach me. I had been away at the age of 38 and wanted to come back so I followed this principle to make one hundred and 50 thousand dollars and to come back home to Ghana and help my people. By simple calculation in my head if I have 1 hundred and 50 thousand dollars and I invest 80% I will get 12 thousand dollars a year. So when I started practicing my basic sound financial management and principles, I practiced and learned to come out with the book 12 Keys To Financial Success and this has been a blessing to many people and basically the important of it all came one of my own devises because I thought that there may be many Christians to whom I am responsible to.