PERSONAL FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT
AND RETIREMENT PLANNING

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.

 

Though I was paying my tithe I was getting much poorer because if you pay the tithe for 10% and spend all the 90% at the end of the mouth you have zero income and the principle I learnt actually when you read the bible, the bible does not say just pay 10% and you will be assured of automatic wealth the principle is to manage. The lord opened my mind in addition to the tithe which is to honor God. It wasn’t a magical formula because the tithe you pay is to honor God and he will bless the hand of your work, your investment, your farm, and other things which means that if you did not invest, did not make your farm, when the rain comes you will get nothing and I believe that, that is the basic truth. I call it the 10:10:80 principle. God actually blesses his tithe for his people but most Christians are poor and the reason is that if you don’t farm you will get nothing. As a Christian if you are a business man or woman and you haven’t put any money in the stock market so it grows by 50% you don’t get anything. I was attending my friend’s mother’s funeral and somebody approached me and said I heard about your 10:10:80 principle and I have practiced it and now I have two houses. I looked around and said my goodness people are following my principle and are much ahead of me. The good news is that at the time when I made my decision I had 65,000 dollars of dept but within 6 years I paid all the dept apart from my mortgage. I only write what God teaches me though dreams and if it is true I put them down so that others will also be blessed. I am following 2 timothy 2:2 which says what God has deposited in you pass it onto other faithful men who will be able to teach others. Therefore my book writings are generally apart from to maintain the academy it is always out of what God is teaching you not to sit down.

I wrote the 7 keys of abundant living with no regret when my eldest son was going to the university; it was just to tell him the things I have done about 50 years. I have a guide line for Christian young person so I share it with him, his friends and then one of my nephews. God insisted I expand it into a booklet so that they will all be able to learn because if they know it will be a blessing to them. I published the book then some people I think were not happy with the book so they reported me to the UN human resources that I have created a book without their permission. Because in it I say that for homosexually as a Christian you should not think about it because God says that it is an abomination. I needed to go and explain myself to the tribunal and our internal tribunal why I should not be disciplined this was for almost a month then one day god Gave me the way to the front of UNBP. I was been prosecuted in that the lady who is the head of the UNBP is a homosexual. This started when I was in New York so I gave them quotations in the bible talking about homosexuality and the case was closed. I told them homosexuality is abominable and for me that is not an issue for discussion. They said yes I can replace it with a reversed edition, when I reversed it then they closed the case. After I wrote to them that I will like to resign from the UN, I think they were so happy that this guy will be leaving us soon. Within a year they separated me and gave me 11 months pay when I added them up it was exactly 150,000 dollars.  

I had a permanent job until I was 60 years by God’s grace so you can fire me if you give me a work for one mile I will do two miles. Nobody in my career ever found a problem with my work that is what I say to the glory of God because I have no father, I have God so when you give me a job I don’t want anybody to come and discuss it. So my financial teachings are out of experience as a business man. I also do a lot of seminars for people born out of personal experience.