Moneywise 16: How to kill Moneyplexes in your finances

Celebrity Blogger Gbenga Dan Asabe with American based Doctor Tobe Momah
It was generally
a warm afternoon, the kind of weather anybody staying in the United
Kingdom
would always pray to have. At our last meeting with my Mentor,
we had agreed to meet again at a location on Tottenham Court Road, in London.

The place was not far away from Waterstone Bookshop, my favorite
rendezvous anytime I was in London. In the early part of the morning, I decided
to play the role of a tour guide to my wife, who was visiting London for the first time. It was an
energy sapping tour. We moved from one end of London to another, changing buses, trains, and, in most cases
walking. At a point, we both knew we had to end our tour. I found myself
eventually at Waterstone Bookshop
with my wife reluctantly agreeing to come along.

She would have
preferred we went to a shoe shop where she could at least do some shopping for
the children. I was on the second floor of the Waterstone building, perusing a book, Unlimited Power, by Anthony
Robbins
. I was so engrossed in a section of the book that I was
oblivious of what was going
on around me. My
wife had comfortably settled down in the coffee section of the bookshop.
Suddenly, there
was a gentle tap on my shoulder. I turned and was surprised to see my Mentor. I
guess he had been there for a couple of minutes before making his presence
known to me. “I now know where to catch
you”,
he said as we both laughed while exchanging greetings. Together, we
surveyed the book sections and he recommended some books to me. I quickly
picked up the books and we both went over to my wife. Within minutes, briskly
we all walked down the stairs and into the main
street. In less than two minutes, we were in an office which I later learnt
belonged to him. We went into an inner room that looked like a meeting room.
There was a young man already in the room.

“My friend, this is what I call an acute
state of Moniplexes (a word
he coined to describe different stages of financial crisis)
and I
suggest that we call in an ambulance immediately to take you to the emergency
unit of a nearby clinic for a quick surgery”.

We
were treated to a lunch of KFC with
some mango juice. We introduced ourselves while eating and I later got to know
that the young man wanted some lessons on personal financial intelligence. The
young man, Dele, told his own story, which was far worse than mine at the
time I met my Mentor.
From his story,
he was a few steps away from terminal financial crisis. He had seen wealth in
its most lavish state and now he was staring at poverty in its most callous
manifestation. But he didn’t want to embrace it.
“Where do we start? My friend, can you be our
lecturer by explaining what has happened to your own position?”
my Mentor asked
me. I politely asked him to take charge as there was no point competing with
the master. A quote I saw with Rev. Adeyerni’s P.A quickly flashed
through my mind: When you are in the
presence of a wise man, talk less, for he already knows what you want to say”.

He gladly took
over: “Let me start with the same way I
start with students in my foundation class”.
“Let me ask you this question. Assuming you are sick,
do you just walk into a medicine store and ask the attendant to give you any
strong pain-relieving drug to take care of your health situation? Will it be
correct to say that you have been cured even if you notice temporary relief?”
“Very unlikely”, Dele replied, while I
nodded in agreement.
“That’s right”, my Mentor said. “Yet, that is what most of us do when we
face difficult financial situations. We want a quick fix. We want a solution by
all means. We want to escape financial crisis now. It doesn’t work that way.
This approach hardly produces any lasting remedy”.
“When you notice an ailment, the appropriate thing
to do is to seek proper medical advice and I am sure a doctor, worth his salt,
would not just administer drugs on a patient, except as a first aid. He would
first conduct tests to determine the nature and the severity of the condition.
It is the result of the diagnosis that would determine the type of medication
to administer, in what concentration and how urgently to administer the drug”.
“The same principle is applicable to fixing a
financial malaise. From my personal experience, I found that attempting to
correct a financial problem without first determining the state of your
financial health will almost always result in a jumbled remedial programme. It
may not be a worthwhile endeavor.
This is what I am going to do for you. I intend to
find out the exact state of your financial health”
He then, pulled
out a file from his drawer and brought out a questionnaire, the same type he
gave to me when I first started with him. He handed it over to Dele
and asked him to complete the questionnaire, consisting of twenty questions. We
chatted away while Dele battled with the questionnaire the same way I did many
months ago. It took him about twenty minutes to complete the questionnaire.
My Mentor
immediately picked his green pen and started to work on his responses.
“My friend, this is what I call an acute state of Moniplexes
(a word he coined to
describe different stages of financial crisis)
and I suggest that we
call in an ambulance immediately to take you to the emergency unit of a nearby
clinic for a quick surgery”.
We all burst into laughter.
“You are all laughing?” He asked. “That is just to tell you how serious the
condition is. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong in this case. Our
friend has violated many rules of informed millionaires and we need to start to
work on it immediately. What I see everywhere are symptoms of acute moniplexes and we need to deal with
them urgently”
When I glanced
at the result, Dele scored nineteen points out of eighty possible points. I
scored twenty-nine when I did my own. But I could see anxiety written all over Dele’s
face. He possibly wasn’t expecting that dismal performance. I felt the same way
when I got my own result. My Mentor paused for a while as we drank our mango
juice.
(Excerpts from
the book: “THE MILLIONAIRES CAPSULES” by AYO AROWOLO. Read “Ona kan O w’oja”
tomorrow on this blog)
Ayo Arowolo, Publisher The Millionaires’ Capsules