Savings Equals Seed for a Future Harvest of Wealth

Yesterday I had the great honor of speaking to university students under the KamiLimu mentorship program about financial management. Speaking to a group of tech students in this Information Age poses one main challenge: you have to present value as this is the day when someone can easily look up whatever information you put to them and challenge it against a million sources online - more so when the audience is a team of tech students. Indeed, I did not hesitate to share this with the team: that all the information I'd be presenting is nothing they wouldn't find by themselves if they sought it out. This being the case, it meant that I was more of a facilitator leading a discussion.

There is something nostalgic about speaking to university students. It reminds me of my days in college where we tried our hands at quite a number of businesses - mostly without success. In hindsight, failure was not necessarily a bad thing. As it has been said, it is better to try and fail than to fail to try. Of course, it is best to try and not fail. They say if you never failed it simply means you never really tried. Success has also been said to be a result of constant failure and improvements. There are also lessons from failure that count for one's success and in the same way that darkness helps us to appreciate the light, failure has a way of making us appreciate success.

One of the things we discussed with KamiLimu students however is that not everyone is cut out for business/entrepreneurship. There are some of us who will do very well in employment and therefore we cannot put pressure on everyone to start a business. The important thing in life is to find who you are meant to be, what you are meant to do and to do your best to flourish in that given space. For me, it seems that entrepreneurship was always beckoning. 

A key highlight from our discussion was a quote from an article by Kellie Murungi,

When you postpone the start of your saving and investing journey, you are losing the one asset you have in your twenties that the rest of us do not: time.

We looked at the two main reasons why you should start your savings now:

1. The power of habits. If you get started now, it is easier to keep the habit building. If you try to start later, you will have to summon the will to start and though later in life you will probably be earning more, similarly you are likely to have more responsibilities; making it even harder to build a savings culture.
2. The power of compound interest means that the earlier you start saving, the more you will stand to gain. A person who starts saving later in life will have to work much harder to attain the same financial goals as someone who started earlier in life. 

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George S. Clason in his book Richest Man in Babylon says that wealth like a tree grows from a tiny seed. The first coin you save is the seed from which your tree of wealth shall grow. The sooner you plant that seed the sooner shall the tree grow. And the more faithfully you nourish and water that tree with consistent savings, the sooner you may bask in contentment beneath its shade. The important thing about building wealth is that you need to start doing it sooner, rather than later. The earlier you start, the more time you will have to build your wealth. The earlier the better. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is now. 

88 year old Warren Buffet planted his tree a long time ago. Buying his first stock at the tender age of 11, he regrets that he did not start investing earlier on in life. Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.


To know and not to do is not to know. We have to find a practical way of putting into practice that which we learn. MoneyBox is a good place to start your savings journey. Growing out of the 52 Week Savings Challenge pioneered by Kellie Murungi, the user friendly app helps you in setting and remaining true to an annual savings goal. 

Like a muscle that grows stronger with consistent use, a savings habit grows by consistency; and as a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, the journey to growing wealth begins with the financial discipline of saving your first coin. All the best in the journey ahead.