Vale Blog
Your Guide to Organizing Your Finances
There is a particular kind of awkwardness that comes with lending money to a friend or family member. You give them the money because they need it, agree on when they'll return it, and then the deadline passes. Suddenly, asking for your own money back feels like an uncomfortable conversation you don't even know how to start. Someone shared a story online that captured this perfectly. They had lent a friend some money, and when the agreed repayment date came, they reached out to ask for it back. The response was: “What do you need it for?”
Psychology professor Catherine Sanderson once put it simply: “We always think if we just had a little bit more money, we'd be happier, but when we get there, we're not.”
Ask someone how they are preparing for December and there is a good chance the answer will be, “I’ll just use my salary.” It makes sense. Salary comes every month, so what could go wrong? Quite a lot, actually.
There is a pattern around the ember months. As the year winds down, fraudulent activity and financial losses have historically shown spikes around this period. More people are spending, doing business and looking for ways to make money before the year ends. This is what the year-end rush creates. It creates an opening for scammers, giving them plenty of room to make a fraudulent offer look like exactly what someone needs.
... Food is already taking a significant share of household spending, and recent data shows that the pressure has not disappeared. The National Bureau of Statistics reported food inflation at 20.31% year on year in July 2026. More recently, the SBM Jollof Index put the average cost of preparing a pot of jollof rice for a family of five at ₦29,578 in June 2026, a 14.6% increase from the same period the previous year.
This check-in is less about asking, “Did I achieve everything I planned?” and more about looking at what has changed and whether the plan still makes sense for the months ahead.