Maybe you can relate to this, maybe not.
After months of squatting with friends and enduring plenty wahala, you’ve finally hustled just enough money to get your own place. You’re super excited about the thought of finally becoming your own man or woman, and you really can’t wait.
The house agent you hired has finally found a house that you really like but the rent is just a little over your budget. It’s just an extra N10,000 you need, but it’s the second week of the month and you’re nursing the last stretch of your salary to get you through. What do you do?
Borrow the money right? But from whom?
Time to have a meeting with yourself. In that meeting, you have to achieve two things: 1) figure out the best person to call that will come through for you, and 2) find a way to ask for the money without losing your ‘big man or big woman’ status.
After 10 minutes of brainstorming, you have the answer. Call Uncle Tunde and ask for the money. Don’t tell him you’re getting a new house though, otherwise he’ll start asking what is wrong with where you’re staying now and why you’re in a hurry to get your own place just because you now have small money. So, you do a little speech practice and put a call through to your uncle telling him that you need to pay for an important exam and the deadline is in two days.
Sure, that sounds serious enough. Four reminder phone calls and 12 hours later, Uncle Tunde is finally ready to send 10,000 Naira to you. No big deal.
A week later, your uncle runs into you with friends at a bar and gives you that look like, “You’re owing me money and you’re drinking abi?”
This is why borrowing money from family or friends isn’t always a bright idea.
First, they always want to know what the money is for. Even if they don’t ask, they expect to be told and that reason better be legit. You can’t just say you want to borrow money and it gets handed to you like they were keeping it for you. Then, there’s the long wait that I’ll never understand. Maybe they think if they send the money immediately, you won’t value it as much, so they have to ‘post’ you small. And then, there’s the icing on the cake–the part where you can’t be seen ‘enjoying’ yourself by the person you borrowed from until you’ve paid the money back.
You can’t wear anything new, you can’t have a drink, you can’t even put meat in your soup. Otherwise, if they visit you and you offer them food, the next thing you’ll hear is “Hmmm, you used goat meat for this soup abi? You’re enjoying o.”
We will all have moments in our lives when we will need a little extra cash to bump us up and help accelerate our plans, whether those plans are personal or business. When these moments come, it will always seem, by default, that the fastest option is to borrow from friends or family. But we all know that road isn’t always smooth.
Now, imagine that there was an app that you could get loans from in minutes without filling out long forms, bringing any guarantor, or even signing a signature. Imagine that! Somebody will give you money without even seeing your face or asking what you want to use the money for. I read about an app like that in the Guardian. It’s called the Branch App. According to the article, it is a leading loan app in Nigeria that has given over 100,000 loans and disbursed over 1 billion Naira in just over a year of operations. It also has over a million downloads and rave reviews on the Google play store.
If you want to know more about the app, you can click HERE.
Next time, I’ll talk more about the use of credit score to determine the loan amount you can get and how you can use the app to build your credit history and unlock access to even larger loans.
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