A young couple invited me for dinner at their house on Friday night.
by Adolf Chirimuta
The couple wanted a supper’s worth of financial and investment advice tailored for young couples.
Coming from a bachelor, a supper’s worth of recommendations can be quite a bit. The two are expecting a little bundle of joy in the next few months and are busy preparing a nursery and have managed to acquire most of the stuff they need for the new arrival.
They were more concerned about investing for the future and the main issue was a secure education fund for their child. I thought this was a very prudent move to be emulated by most young couples from all walks of life.
I found it to be a perfect opportunity to share some of my thoughts on debentures being offered by a local church for the development of a church-owned Christian international school.
When the private offer was made to the church members, of which I am one, I thought to myself what better way to kill two birds with one stone, one can both set up an education fund for their child and at the same time help to build a state-of-the-art school with world class standards for the child to attend in the future, while at the same time it is a secure investment for any excess cash one might be holding.
I have known the senior pastors of this particular ministry who are behind this noble project to be respectable people with a clear vision, a standard of excellence and a reputation to deliver on what they promise to deliver and therefore have my full confidence in giving them an unsecured debt via a debenture and would recommend anyone else to do the same if they have excess cash.
When investing in debentures one needs to do so with patience and more than one objective in mind.
In my case, I would buy a debenture for the school construction project for a number of reasons other than financial gain, chief among them the fact that I share the vision of what the proprietors are endeavouring to achieve.
Having considered that an education fund is a fundamental financial plan for one’s future I strongly believe that there is no better way to invest for an education fund than in aiding with the construction of the very institution that one’s child might possibly attend in the future.
To me it makes financial sense to re-invest accrued interest over the years in further purchase of more debentures from those individuals who might prefer to liquidate early, seeing that it is a transferable instrument or simply using the interest to pay school fees and wait for maturity date to pay university tuition.
This instrument can pretty much be used to raise funds for any kind of project, call me a sentimental guy, but I would advise that for this nature of investment you keep it to sustainable ventures with a social dividend to the community and are being run by credible people, as some proprietors might not honour their pledges and result in an eventual loss of value on the investors part, as this sort of investment is often not tied to any asset collateral.
