Kamehan

My uncle, who is an owner of a very successful meat wholesaler in Brooklyn is basically self-taught with everything that is related to business and finance. As an immigrant, he basically embodies the American dream of making it in a new land. I always wondered what his secret was when it came to getting to the point where he was, and whenever we would visit one another, we would often discuss making opportunity happen.

One of the big parts of the discussion was money; how difficult it can be to manage, and especially, how it hard it can be to save. However, there was one day that he made everything much more simpler for me when I started getting concerned about saving money. I was young then, but knew that the time would come where personal management was going to be more and more prevalent.

He told me  that one of the most important things that anyone could do was to pretend that you didn’t have any money at all, even when you did. If there is a time that expenses aren’t that bad, and you have the opportunity to put some away, then this is the golden moment. Take that money that you made, and simply pretend that you don’t have it. Forget about what is sitting in your name and just keep it like that.

It may be tempting to dive in to the funds. You move into an apartment (important), and are pressured to get something like a direct satellite TV, but sometimes it necessary to control yourself.

Of course, this sounds like a difficult thing to maintain, but it’s just a matter of free will. The thing with money is that it’s just an object, an idea. You can’t let it take control of you.

I have the learned the lesson from my uncle, and taken it extremely seriously. I got through all of college with a good amount always saved up. I can’t say the same thing about my other friends, who often struggled.

Student loans are a fact of life for thousands of college students each year who enter the halls of higher education, knowing the costs are great yet confident that they will pay off in a few years, probably after they settle into a good paying job with great benefits and a bright future ahead. Never mind that many of today’s students take on in excess of 100,000 dollars in debt by the time they graduate.

The days of keeping track of accounting in musty old paper ledgers came to an end years ago. Now, many businesses use accounting software like Intuit’s QuickBooks to manage their business finance. This makes sense, since it is much easier to have accurate record keeping on a computer than on long sheets of paper than can be lost, damaged, or misplaced.