Some Kenyans have a queer habit of always splashing what little money they have. Frequently, they paint the town red with the help of eager, unofficial lovers and hangers-on that they date.

Do you occasionally feel the need for a little inspiration on your road to wealth creation? Perhaps, like me, you love to read about people who started small and beat all odds and made a dramatic rise in their financial situation.

This year’s Christmas season starts in a week’s time and like last year, some people are bound to exceed their budgets and eat into their savings. Even the most conscientious cost cutters are sometimes guilty of throwing away money needlessly on vacation.

A popular Kiswahili saying goes that: aliye juu mngoje chini. This loosely translates that pride comes before a fall.

Last week, Chief Justice Willy Mutunga, made history of a kind. While emphasising the need for the media and the Communications Authority of Kenya to strike a deal on digital switch dispute, he quoted Ken wa Maria’s hit song Fundamentals.

A pervasive and costly myth is that many townspeople count themselves lucky for being at the centre of things. Whether they are employed or in business, such town dwellers are often the first to zap up every new trend.

Gideon Lang’at, a teacher, has been losing his hard-earned cash to mobile phone money transfer services. Lang’at is a senior manager in his school and parents normally send money to their children through his mobile account.

Lotteries are back with a bang. From FM radio stations and banks to mobile phone service providers and supermarket chains, businesses are giving out corporate largesse and turning people into instant millionaires, or so we are made to believe.

Ken Kimani and three of his colleagues acted as guarantors to a fellow teacher when he took a loan of Sh1.2 million from their savings and credit society. The four hardly knew the borrower and had first met him in the banking hall.

Many employed urbanites cannot admit that it hurts them to host relatives from upcountry, especially those who come unannounced and the job seekers whose visit is indefinite.

Many employed urbanites cannot admit that it hurts them to host relatives from upcountry, especially those who come unannounced and the job seekers whose visit is indefinite.

Membership to old students associations and other development-related outfits can be costly if one does not exercise monetary caution.

Geoffrey Maina advises job seekers to save a “war chest” to avoid having to raid their upkeep and children’s school fees budgets when changing careers.

The sudden end of formal schooling can be traumatic to young people. More so, a Form Four candidate who quits midstream. This happened to Yonah Nelson, a former student of Muhuri Muchiri secondary in Nairobi County.

Many people routinely take loans from financial institutions for various reasons. Indeed, the search for loans can be frantic and attractive when one is in the middle of a personal crisis.

Adopting a flashy lifestyle to demonstrate your new status is foolish.

Witness the many strange things that scores of Kenyans do with any irregularly acquired cash, like working out how many bottles of beer it can buy.

A literal belief in this saying continues to lead some younger people into financial recklessness as they wait to turn forty and, magically, start organising their money goals.

It is a societal taboo to flaunt wealth. Even proverbs and wise sayings caution that wealth can easily ‘melt’ if one lacks the right attitude to it.

With the new school term starting next week, many parents will certainly fall prey to the many tricks used by pupils in obtaining more ‘pocket’ money than they require.

One of the biggest technological leaps in recent times has been the advent of the social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WAYN, LinkedIn, Google Plus and YouTube, among others.

On Thursday, April 17 2014, The Standard led with the story of an imminent clash between the TSC and the teachers union Knut, over promotion of teachers.

This year’s Easter holiday comes this weekend. And as is customary, many people will take leave of their financial senses and overspend, the consequences of which are likely to derail them from their financial goals.

At least three local television stations have programmes whose themes are education and what goes with it. These are KBC’s Classmates, K24’s Ngubaru Skool and Citizen TV’s Tahidi High programmes.

It’s 9am and Luli Bashir, 38, is on time for our early morning appointment.

For five days last week, a select group of artistes from four African countries assembled for an experimental project mooted to celebrate the diversity of modern global urban music at the Nairobi Goethe Institute.

Lupita Nyong’o is certainly the international dream girl of the moment, not just because she has just won a coveted Oscar for best supporting actress, she also posseses all the essential factors stardom is made of.

Drug cartels have infiltrated schools and colleges and are using students as conduits for their deadly merchandise.

Linda Maingi, an insurance broker, remembers how she and her siblings would spy on their father as he “inspected” the chicken houses and cattle sheds while she was growing up.

If there is one word that can describe the Jubilee government last year, it is fumbling! The cacophony on devolution and the constitutional interpretation of everything provided the perfect alibi for government apparatchiks to bumble at their jobs.

This year’s Christmas will be celebrated mid this week and marking this day can be fairly expensive for many people who don’t have a plan. But planning does not mean that, like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ book A Christmas Carol, you should avoid the festivity altogether and walk around with a defeatist expression.

A male teacher in Vihiga County was last month interdicted after allegedly drugging female students as he prepared a party for them after their national examinations.

One grey area in our personal finances is that we rarely face our mobile phone bills head on! We continue making calls to talk trivial things that cannot justify the cost of the airtime in these hard times. But while your friends and relatives expect you to keep in touch by calling them, you can save a lot of money by re-examining your calling habits.

In one secondary school, a teacher noted a sharp decline in one boy’s performance in class. After inquiring, she realised the boy had fallen out with his parents over how they treated him and his elder sister.