By Babajide Komolafe

As stated in the previous edition, a financial windfall is an opportunity to create wealth and increase your regular income. That is why you need to avoid spending from the windfall. Save and invest all or most of it immediately. This takes discipline, which is one major factor that determines financial success.

Investing your financial windfall immediately gives you the opportunity to increase your income in a sustainable way. A N1 million income immediately invested in a money market mutual fund, can add N170,000 to your annual income.This

This allows you more money to meet your basic needs and improve your standard of living over time. By doing so, you also preserve the windfall.

Investing the financial windfall immediately also gives you time to carefully think about what you can do with the money to create wealth. Perhaps, you desire to establish a business venture but you don’t have an idea what kind of business, or you have an idea but you don’t know how to achieve it, you can now take time to carefully research and think through what to do and how to do it and what the returns would likely be.

This is because many business ideas are not as profitable as you might think. The cost of setting up the business may be far more than what you can finance with money from the windfall, and added to this is the fact that it is easy to lose money in business either due to inexperience or to fraudsters.

Also, there is the reality that you may not have the capacity to run a business and it takes a lot of sincerity to accept this fact. There are people who lost all or almost all their financial windfall in an attempt to use it to establish a business. There are people who resigned from well paying salary jobs simply to depend on income from business to be established from what they consider a big financial windfall. However, and to their surprise the business either fails or performs very poorly such that the income is far below what they need to sustain themselves and their dependents. As a result they had to return to paid employment.

That is why, the most expedient thing to do with your financial windfall, especially if you already have a regular source of income be it salary or business income, is to invest in a passive income, mutual funds, shares, treasury bills, commercial papers, a secure landed property or real estate.