It is something that affects all our daily lives, so having an open conversation about it is something that is very crucial especially to the youth. Our presenter for the meeting was Leonard Ishimwe from Montreal, QC and he presented methods that people can use to manage their money both in the long term and short term.
The main topics that he covered throughout the meeting were: income, saving, spending and last but not least investing. We started off talking about the importance of creating a personalized budget to keep track of your money so that you can have a clear view of how to use all your sources of income. For example, we talked about methods a person can use while creating his budget like the 50/30/20 rule where 50% of a person’s income should go towards his essential expenses, 30% should go to his non-essential expenses and then 20% should be allocated towards debt repayments and savings.
We continued the conversation with debt management. We talked about the importance of building good credit, the financial burden debt payment can have on individuals, the different types of debts and the most important part which is how a person should strategize and pay off their debts using techniques like the debt avalanche method. After that, we proceeded with talking about Investing and why it is urgent to start as soon as possible because time is your biggest advantage. We spoke about the importance of having a diverse portfolio of investments, the different investments a person could make and the key to thinking in a compound way and not in a linear way. We also touched on the importance of an individual having life insurance because it could help with matters like debt settlement, education expenses, estate liquidity, etc.
Throughout the whole presentation, there was a lot of participation from the group, a lot of sharing about personal financial experiences and overall, great advice giving between the participants. To summarize, because it was impossible to cover each subject in depth with the amount of time that we had set aside for the meeting, at the end of the dialogue all the participants were willing and motivated to make their own personal research in depth regarding all topics that we covered so that they can get a better understanding.
Aimable Kalinijabo