Smart Pinoy Investor: February 2011

Let my first blog here be a confession.

Since I was a child until the time I graduated in college, I am unconsciously financially ignorant.

I didn’t know how money works, why the rich are rich and the poor are poor, and why it remains that way.

I even had a blurred idea of making a deposit in a bank until high school.

Now that’s actually a big problem.
Why?

First because I was ignorant about a thing that “makes the world go round”, second because I was not even aware of it.

I believed money is important, but reflexively, I told myself that it’s bad, and so I stopped myself to have more of it without even conscious of that behavior.

Whenever a lump of money falls in my hand, I had that unstoppable tendency to always spend it until I’ m left something I’m comfortable with.

My picture of a rich man is bad greedy man, one who always oppresses the poor to remain rich, or a corrupt official at the expense of the suffering public.

Money for me is the root of all evil, and anyone having much of it is an epitome of a selfish materialistic picture destined to suffer in hell upon his death.

In fact, when I graduated from college, an inside fear came creeping telling me that a job might give me money big enough to make me forget the most important things in life (relationships, friends, quality time etc). I’m afraid it would control me instead of I being able to handle it.

But not until now.

Thank God He didn’t allow me to stay in that unsupportive behavior. His grace was once again made perfect in that very weak area of my life.

While my beliefs on the most crucial aspects of our lives remain the same and solid, I’m now seeing money as a tool to improve these jars of our lives instead of as a curse to get rid of.

Money automatically becomes an available means for anyone to serve the mission God has prepared for him.