Fighting For My Bottom Line

We're launching an experiment: every week, we’ll dig into the world of money and markets, see what’s happening, help you make sense of it, and tell you how it affects your bottom line.

Money is hard to understand – how it’s made, protected, or grown – and it’s not your fault. 

Look, I get it –navigating the world of money feels like a maze designed by a toddler. But when you’re doing this in a country like Nigeria, it’s on a whole new level of insanity. The entire finance industry – the old financial institutions and the new fintechs – promises they can help everyone find a path to financial freedom. And maybe they can when they’re not trying to sell you a new product, but there are also factors even the banks can’t control. 

How did we get here? 

In 2016, perplexed, I lay on a couch in my brother’s living room: “What the hell does the floating of the naira mean?” My brother, who’d spent almost a decade working in finance then, broke it down for me like I was five. 

I went on to write about it, and seeing how people reacted to it across the internet made something clear: I’m not alone in my curiosity and confusion about money. My curiosity about money kicked into another gear; I wasn’t just interested in the macroeconomic sense but in how it affects everyday people like you and me. 

A few years later in 2019, after months of experimentation, I started writing this series called Naira Life; a weekly exploration of people’s relationship with money. Every Monday at 9am for a hundred weeks, I published one story about a real person and their real financial struggles. 

I haven’t written an episode since December 2020, but it still continues to be relevant to audiences everywhere and to me. 

What’s the Bottom Line

Bottom Line is the overall financial health and stability of a person.

What we’re trying to do with Bottom Line is different. We’re looking at what’s happening in the rapidly changing economic landscape, looking for the clearest insights, distilling them, explaining why they matter, and, most importantly, showing you how they affect your bottom line. 

It’s an uphill battle, and we’re trying to find the path of least resistance for ourselves. 

Every Sunday at 6 pm WAT, we’ll look at what’s happened in the past week and how it affects your bottom line, and we’ll try to look into the future and keep you ahead for the new week. This time, another brilliant writer, Aisha Bello will be diving deep, looking for signals, while I edit everything she finds and beat it into shape.

Read her first episode:

My Internet Has Gone To The Pits

To make sense of everything we find, we’re creating a small council of people who work across various disciplines in finance. Their insights will help us navigate the complexities of the markets and how they move, including the policies and how they hit our pockets. We’re also going to be doing this jargon-free. 

This is what you should do

To make this work, we’ll need a lot of help from you. Tell us your questions, points of confusion, and the square pegs in the round parts of your life. Your questions will shape this dispatch into the meaningful thing it needs to be to improve your bottom line. 

For now, subscribe to this newsletter – if you’re already subscribed to Vistanium, subscribe here, too, since we haven’t added old subscribers by default. Share this newsletter, too: the more people see it, the more they read, and the more they have questions or perspectives you didn’t know you needed. 

That’s it for now; see you next Sunday, 6pm WAT.