Meet Mrs. Mayowa, a Nigerian woman whose story demonstrates how small, consistent financial choices can build a secure future. Starting with her first salary in 1998, she developed businesses in fabrics and foodstuffs, raised a family, faced setbacks, and prepared for a slower pace of life… all while cultivating a saving habit. Documented in an old notebook filled with decades of records, Mrs. Mayowa’s experience shows how everyday decisions made over many years can lead to stability, resilience, and financial peace during uncertain times.
On a Tuesday morning in Lagos, shortly after 9 a.m., I sat at the dining table in my two-bedroom flat with an old notebook in front of me.
The notebook had been with me for almost three decades. Its brown cover had faded at the edges, and the pages had become soft from years of being opened, closed, moved around and stored away. Every now and then, beside an amount, I had written one simple word: Saved.
I ran my finger down one of the pages and smiled.
“That was when I was still working,” I said to myself.
The amount on the page was not particularly large. If I had looked at it only as money, it would have been easy to dismiss. By today’s standards, it would have barely covered a few household expenses. But I remembered exactly what that money had meant to me at the time.
When I was much younger, I had a modest salary. I was helping my parents, paying transport costs, buying food and trying to establish myself. There was always something that needed money. I could have spent that particular amount, but instead, I saved it.
I did the same thing the following month, and the month after that. I did not know it then, but those small decisions would eventually become one of the most important financial habits of my adult life.
When I thought about my financial journey, I did not think about becoming wealthy overnight. I had not discovered some secret investment that changed my life. I had not received a huge inheritance or suddenly found myself with more money than I knew what to do with.
My story was much less dramatic than that.
I had simply learned, very early, to keep some of the money that came into my hands.
1998: When I Earned My First Salary
I was 21 when I got my first proper job. I had recently completed my education and was living with my parents. Like many young people starting out, I was excited to finally have an income of my own. The salary wasn’t much, but the first time I received it, I felt rich.
There was something different about money that belonged to me. For the first time, I could decide what to do with my own earnings. Nobody had to tell me what to buy or what not to buy. And, of course, I had plans. I wanted new clothes. I wanted to contribute more at home. I wanted to help my younger siblings. I wanted to go out with friends sometimes. I wanted a mobile phone.
There were plenty of things I wanted, and none of them seemed unreasonable. But after a few months, I noticed something… my salary would come in, and before I knew it, the money was gone.
I wasn’t living an extravagant life. I wasn’t buying expensive things every week. The problem was that every expense seemed reasonable when I looked at it by itself. Transport, food, airtime, you name them… they were all necessary. There were birthdays, family contributions, church activities, clothes and the occasional request from a relative.
Small expenses had a way of becoming large when they were all added together. One evening, I complained to an older colleague.
“How come I get paid and the money disappears?”
She laughed and said something that stayed with me.
“Because you’re waiting to see what is left before you save.”
At the time, I hadn’t thought about it that way. I had been treating savings as whatever happened to remain after I had finished spending. If there was money left, I would save it. The problem was that there was almost never anything left. So the following month, I tried something different. When my salary arrived, I put a small amount aside immediately.
It wasn’t an impressive amount. I wasn’t trying to become wealthy. I simply wanted to make sure that something remained after everything else had taken its share. The first month, I almost withdrew it. The second month, I forgot about it. By the eighth month, saving had started to feel normal. That was the beginning.
2000–2003: Learning That More Income Didn’t Automatically Mean More Security
Over the next few years, my salary increased gradually (and so did my expenses). That was my first real lesson in personal finance: earning more money did not automatically make me financially secure.
Whenever I earned more, there seemed to be somewhere else for the money to go. I upgraded a few things. I bought better clothes. I contributed more to my family. Eventually, I moved into a better apartment. My responsibilities increased along with my income. But I continued saving.
Some months, I saved a significant amount. Other months, I saved very little. There were even months when I couldn’t save anything at all. I eventually stopped beating myself up about those months. Instead, I focused on returning to the habit. I also started keeping records.
At first, the notebook was simply a collection of figures. I wrote down what came in and what went out. Over time, it became a record of my financial life. I could look back and see where my money had gone. I could identify expenses that repeatedly caught me by surprise. I could see how much I was spending on things that seemed insignificant at the time. I didn’t have a sophisticated financial plan, and I didn’t know exactly what my life would look like ten or twenty years later. I didn’t know what businesses I would eventually run or what responsibilities would come my way.
But I understood one thing–if I spent every naira that came into my hands, there would be nothing waiting for me when I needed it. So I began making room for the future.
2004: The Business I Didn’t Plan to Start
My first business started almost accidentally. People at work had always complimented my clothes. Friends would ask where I bought certain fabrics, and eventually one of my colleagues asked whether I could help her find some material for an upcoming family event and I agreed.
I bought the fabric, added a small markup and delivered it. The profit was modest, but it gave me an idea! I started buying fabrics in small quantities and selling them to friends, colleagues and people within my community.
At the beginning, there was no shop. There was no elaborate branding. There was no business plan filled with projections. There was simply me, my contacts and a growing list of people who knew I could help them find good fabrics. I made one rule for myself very early:
Business money was not personal money.
That rule became important. When I made a profit, I didn’t immediately spend it. Some of the money went back into buying more stock. Some went into my savings. The rest could be used for other needs, and the business grew slowly.
By 2006, I was making enough from it to make a noticeable difference in my finances. My salary was still my main source of income, but the fabric business had become a second stream. That changed the way I thought about money.
I began to understand that financial stability did not necessarily have to come from one source. I could earn a salary. I could build a business. I could save a portion of what both provided. I didn’t know where those lessons would take me yet but I simply kept going.
2007–2010: Marriage, Children and a New Business
I got married in my early 30s. (Fair enough for some.) Marriage brought happiness, but it also brought new financial responsibilities. There were now two people to consider, and then three, and eventually four. Children changed the mathematics of everything.
There were school expenses, food, clothing, healthcare and countless smaller costs that seemed to appear without warning. My salary alone was no longer enough to provide the flexibility I wanted. My fabric business was still running, but I began looking for another opportunity.
Surprisingly, I found one in foodstuff. People around me regularly travelled long distances to buy rice, beans, garri, palm oil, and other household staples at better prices. I started buying in larger quantities and selling smaller quantities within my community. But the business was more demanding than I expected.
There were suppliers to deal with, customers wanted to buy on credit, prices changed, transport costs, competition, and so many more! Some months were good. Others were difficult. Truly entrepreneurship isn’t for the fainthearted.
And I learned another important lesson:
Sales were not profit.
A business could generate plenty of cash and still leave very little at the end. So,I started keeping more detailed records.
- How much had I spent?
- How much had I sold for?
- What had transport cost?
- What was left?
- How much needed to return to the business?
- How much could I actually keep?
The notebook became thicker, and so did my financial discipline. I became more careful about separating business capital from personal money. I stopped looking at every naira in my hands as money that was automatically available to spend. That distinction made my decisions much clearer.
2011: The First Time My Savings Had to Rescue Me
There was a time I lost money in one of my businesses. It wasn’t enough to destroy everything I had built, but it was enough to hurt. A lot happened in that period I can’t share publicly.
A customer had taken goods on credit and failed to pay. A supplier problem followed, and several expenses arrived at almost the same time. I remembered how frustrating that period felt. This is the part of running a business no one warns you about.
I had been careful, kept records, worked hard, yet suddenly, several things were going wrong at once. For a moment, I even considered borrowing. Then I remembered the money I had been putting aside for years. I opened the “box” and that was the first time I fully understood what the money had been doing all those years. I used part of it to handle the immediate expenses and then began rebuilding.
There was no dramatic turnaround. I simply started saving again, but that experience changed how I viewed emergency savings. Before then, saving had mostly represented preparation for the future. Now I understood another purpose: savings could absorb a shock. They could stop one unexpected problem from becoming five. I stopped thinking of my savings as money that was simply sitting idle and that was a turning point for me.
2012–2015: When Everybody Needed Something
By the early 2010s, I was no longer the young woman who had celebrated her first salary. My children were growing. My parents were getting older. My responsibilities were expanding in different directions. There were weddings, funerals, school fees, medical expenses, household repairs and requests for help. A relative might call and say, “Aunty, please, I need your help.”
Sometimes I could help. Sometimes I couldn’t.
I had to learn that financial discipline also meant knowing when to say no. My savings were no longer one large pool of money. I began separating my goals into different categories. There was money for emergencies, money for business, money for expected large expenses and longer-term savings.
I wasn’t a financial expert and I had never studied finance professionally but years of managing my own money had taught me something valuable:
Money became easier to manage when I gave it a purpose.
If money had no purpose, it was easy to spend. If it had one, spending it became a decision. This became particularly important as my income increased. I had started noticing a pattern in my life. Whenever I earned more, my expenses seemed to expand to meet the new income.
I could always justify spending more because I was earning more. So I began doing something different. Whenever my income increased, I tried to increase what I saved before allowing my lifestyle to expand by the same amount. Although it wasn’t perfect but over time, it made a difference.
2016: When My Business Became Bigger Than Me
By 2016, my foodstuff business had grown beyond the small operation I had started years earlier. I rented a larger space, began dealing with more customers and hired two people to help. For the first time, I had employees depending on the business and that alone changed my relationship with risk. I couldn’t simply think about myself anymore.
There were wages to pay, rent, stock, suppliers, transport, household expenses and other business obligations. The business was doing well, but I refused to interpret a good month as permission to immediately increase my lifestyle. I had seen enough difficult months to know better. Instead, I increased my savings. Lol.
Something else I did was become more deliberate about keeping business capital separate from my personal savings. When the business made more money, I reinvested some of it. When my personal income increased, I saved some of that too. My children sometimes wondered why I was so cautious.
“Why don’t you just buy it?” I remember the older one asking me one time we were coming back from church.
I answered, “Because being able to afford something today doesn’t mean it is wise to spend the money today.”
At the time, it probably sounded like something parents would say but years later, my children understood it differently.
2017–2019: When Life Felt Comfortable
Honestly, those were comfortable years. The businesses were generating income. The children were progressing through school. My husband had his own income. There was food in the house, bills were being paid and there were occasional holidays. We could replace an old appliance without panicking. From the outside, I probably looked financially comfortable. But I continued saving (nah, I didn’t give up that habit so easily). This was one of the least visible parts of my financial journey. But people noticed spending–a car, a bigger house, nice outfits, holidays, etc. They rarely noticed the money someone chose not to spend.
Nobody applauded me when I left money untouched in my account. They didn’t see the opportunities I declined because I wanted to maintain my savings. Nobody knew how many times I looked at something I wanted and decided that the money had another job–the financial foundation was being built quietly.
And because things were going well, it would have been easy to stop. Instead, I became even more intentional! I had learned that the best time to prepare for a difficult period was often before the difficult period arrived. I didn’t know what the next crisis would be but somehow, I just knew there would eventually be one.
2020: The Year Everything Changed
Then the world stopped. The pandemic disrupted businesses everywhere, and for me, the impact was immediate. Customers reduced their spending. Movement became difficult, suppliers struggled, and the business slowed. Some days, I opened the shop and barely made enough sales to justify being there.
For the first time in years, I faced a prolonged period of uncertainty. This was different from an ordinary bad month. And there was no guarantee that the following month would be better. I reduced expenses, protected whatever cash I could and paused some plans and… (you guessed it) I relied on my savings! The money I had accumulated over the years became a bridge.
It helped with household expenses and business costs and gave my family room to adjust while income was uncertain. But even with that, there were still difficult moments, things I couldn’t afford. And even days I was really worried. And to be fair my savings did not make the crisis disappear, although it helped a bit.
2021–2023: Starting Again
After the worst disruption passed, my business gradually recovered but I was different. The pandemic had changed the way I thought about financial security. I became more conservative about taking on debt. I kept more cash available and reviewed my expenses more frequently.
I became less interested in looking successful and more interested in being financially prepared. My children were older now. One had finished university. Another was already working. The family dynamics were changing. And for the first time in decades, I began thinking seriously about my own future.
What would happen when I stopped working?
How much would I need each month?
What income would remain?
Which businesses could continue without me?
What would happen if I became unable to work?
These were uncomfortable questions but I had learned not to wait for uncomfortable realities before preparing for them. My savings habit now had another purpose beyond “the next emergency”. I was saving for the transition into another stage of my life.
2024: Learning to Slow Down
In 2024, I began reducing my workload. I was no longer interested in spending twelve hours a day managing a business. I still made money and still handled some transactions, but I wanted something I had rarely allowed myself during my busiest years: Time.
Time for myself.
Time with my family.
Time to rest.
My income was now lower than it had been during my busiest years. For the first time, I could clearly see the value of everything I had done earlier. The goal had never been to accumulate money forever but to create financial stability that could eventually give me choices. I had saved during years when I was earning. Now I could use some of that money during years when I was earning less.
That was the transition nobody had explained to me when I was 21.
2026: The Money I Kept
And that brought me back to the dining table. The old notebook was still there but the handwriting was smaller now, and some of the figures looked almost unbelievable when I compared them with the amounts I dealt with today.
I turned a few pages.
There were records from my early salary, business expenses, school fees, notes about purchases, withdrawals and deposits.
There were years when the numbers grew quickly.
There were years when they barely moved.
There were years when I had to take money out.
The notebook didn’t tell a story of perfect financial behaviour though… I didn’t have so much education or background or leverage as most people would have today. I didn’t describe myself as wealthy and honestly I didn’t have a perfect investment portfolio, and I didn’t claim to have made every financial decision correctly. (I did a few investments though)
Some businesses had failed.
Some investments had not worked out.
Some opportunities had passed me by.
What I Understood Later
When people asked me about money, I didn’t talk much about getting rich, I talked about options.
The option to handle an emergency without immediately borrowing. The option to take a break from work, help a child when necessary, keep a business alive during a difficult period or to say no to a financial decision that didn’t make sense.
And perhaps most importantly, the option to face an uncertain month without immediately feeling that everything was about to fall apart. Sometimes I thought about the young woman I had been in 1998. I had been 21 years old, with my first salary, big plans and very little money.
I remembered the first time I decided to save before spending and at the time, the amount probably seemed insignificant. Haha. But looking back in hindsight, it wasn’t. Truly, it was the beginning of a conversation between my present self and my future self.
Every time I saved, I was saying:
“I may need this later.”
And later eventually came! Many times!
It came through business setbacks, family responsibilities, economic uncertainty, a pandemic, changing income and eventually a slower chapter of life.
The Money I Kept
My journey taught me the importance of saving a small amount when my income was modest, keeping business money separate from personal money, increasing my savings when my income improved, and rebuilding when I had to use what I had saved.
This meant accepting that some months would be better than others. It could mean understanding that using my savings for a genuine need did not mean the habit had failed.
I mean, that was what the money had been there for, and decades later, when life became less predictable and my income began to slow, the money I had kept gave me something I could not have bought at the time I started saving: breathing room.
Sometimes, that was what saving was really about. Nothing big here, just making sure that when tomorrow arrived, my future self wasn’t starting from zero.