Developing Financial Intelligence In Life and Ministry

Have you noticed that your banker has never asked for your report card or certificate? Ordination papers from the best seminaries or PHD from premier universities do not matter before your banker. The reason why he is not impressed solely by your curriculum vitae is that he wants to see how smart you have been after leaving school. The bank wants to see a measure of your financial intelligence, not your scholastic intelligence. Your financial statement is a much better measure of your financial intelligence than your report card. Good grades count in school while financial intelligence count in real life. Your financial statement is your report card when you leave school. Academic Intelligence Quotient (A. I. Q.) has no bearing with a person's Financial Intelligence Quotient (F.I.Q.). In the course of my professional work as a management consultant and ministerial engagement as a pastor, I have come across bank managers and 'Finance experts" who are financial illiterates. This is why several professionals struggle financially once they are out of salaried job. That accounts for why most top people resist early retirement. As I wrote in my fifth book HOW TO FIRE YOUR BOSS AND HIRE YOURSELF, "People who need salary are slaves to salary." Many people, 95% to be precise, work to earn, while 5% earn to learn. It is this small percentage that have developed their financial intelligence. Don't spend all your working life beefing up your curriculum vitae (C.V).

CV holds no water outside paid employment it is your level of financial intelligence that will determine your well being and survivability in real world. In my sixth book, DIG YOUR WELL BEFORE YOU 'RE THIRSTY, I wrote about the story of an erudite professor who was among the participants in my Retirement Planning Workshop in a Federal University. This professor was lecturing abroad as at 1975 and invested in some shares. She sold off her shares on return to Nigeria and faced her work. She rose to the pinnacle of her career, thirty years later, with many published academic research papers to her credit. She was now faced with the reality of retirement. I quoted her in my book, where she announced over the microphone, "I have been very foolish these past thirty years. Here am I with no solid plan for my life after retirement". The story didn't end there. In my private session with the professor and some other profound lecturers and distinguished professionals, (several of them have Bankers, Financial Accountants and Investment Analysts as either spouses or children), they wondered aloud "but why has this close person failed to advice me?"

It was then that the lesson of the session I was handling with them sunk. Academic Intelligence has no bearing with Financial Intelligence. Financial Education does not always amount to Financial Intelligence.