Making money work for you

I SHARE my thoughts about the very important aspect of life skills that most Papua New Guineans (the income earners) are still struggling with, the very underlying issues that put so much pressures and difficulties in household income sustainability in our challenging economic environment.
I have observed many highly paid professionals, including medium-to-low income earners, still confronting financial difficulties to keep them going because they lack financial ability to put their money into the right place to enable them to become financially free.
They can’t even able to manage their lives more proficiently because their entire lives have been surrounded by so much debt, irrespective of their positions and
the employment packages they have .
Many people often think that graduating with a skilled profession and securing a well-paid job is an achievement but in fact, we don’t realise that we fall into a trap and our life has been mortgaged throughout our entire employment career.
Being one of the so-called professional managers, doctors, lawyers and engineers, etc, is the dream of many people.
Our parents nowadays only disciplined us to go to school, score good grades and get well-paid jobs.
But we don’t realize that after all, we all want to be a slave because we want to work hard for money.
However, the more we earn the higher we pay, and that is the simple rule where the more income we earn, the higher it cost our income.
Because we earn more, we want to enjoy a luxurious so we continue to spend more.
Our spending behaviour has crippled us so badly because we don’t have prudent financial management skills and ability to survive from our income.
At the end of the day, we don’t realise that our life have been trapped by debt every fortnight. Our credit card has been mortgaged because our salary has been taxed, loans to repay, bills to cover and a rent as well as
our ongoing fortnightly expenses, etc.
Our money is not growing to help cover the debts incurred to ensure we are financially free, yet we are more liable to pay up our debts every fortnight when we earned.
Unfortunately that doesn’t satisfy us and because of our desire to earn more money, we continue to work harder to get promoted for a higher job security.
But then, the rule simply says it all – the higher we earn the higher we pay because our high salary package will result in higher income tax, motor vehicle fuel, registration, and repair and maintenance expenses and a mansion that comes with the responsibility to pay higher bills, rent and so forth.
Again, those hefty costs then put our fortnightly income into a debt trap so it caused us to work more to earn more.
Our fortnightly salary is mortgaged, and we continue to work harder to earn more. We don’t realise that we become slave working for money. The money itself is our master.
Having this in mind, I am so concerned that the responsible government authorities have to now implement a financial literacy curriculum similar to physical education (health and fitness) to ensure our children learn money management skills and ways they can grow additional assets so that they live a financial healthy life.
Regardless of whichever educational speciality career path, financial literacy must be at the centre of our learning and development to effectively improve financial management skills, the principles of growing wealth so that we cannot rely heavily on our fortnightly income.
The Government should do away with the traditional mentality of going to school just to earn a diploma or degree to look for a job but taking into account the
way we can use our professional qualification to grow our own wealth and invest our asset in a place that can allow money to work for us and not for us to work for money.
We must engage our professional skills into a place where it will grow our money, to cause money to be a slave working for us.
The Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil. Well, if you love money you become a slave but if you don’t love money, you make money your slave.
The more you love money, the harder you work to fulfill your desire; you become a slave to money.
The rich don’t work for money, they allow money to work for them, they are debt free and the higher they earned, the lesser it cost them, and they have the ability to grow money or the money is a slave working for them.
So if you are working for someone or a company, start changing your way of thinking and putting money into the right place so that you will not be a poor slave working for money but making money work for you.

Ngayam David
Concerned Citizen