Why “I Still Have Time” Is the Biggest Money Mistake

You think you have time. Time to save.  Time to invest. Time to figure things out later. But what if that’s the biggest lie keeping you stuck?

In this episode of The Money Blueprint Podcast, Isaac Nkusi breaks down one of the most dangerous beliefs in personal finance: “I’ll start later.”

Because while you’re waiting, something else is moving faster than you think—
 inflation, lifestyle, and lost opportunity.

This episode is not about urgency for the sake of pressure. It’s about understanding the real cost of delay.

🎧 The Money Blueprint Podcast is about turning financial knowledge into execution — helping you build wealth with clarity, discipline, and structure.

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Produced by LF Media

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Are you broke because your knowledge about money is just theory? Look, let me describe someone to you real quick, and I want you to be honest with yourself while I do so. You may know this person. They're not careless with their money, they're not irresponsible. In fact, on paper, they're doing pretty okay with what they have. They earn a reasonable amount of money, they manage that money well, they think about their future more than most people around them do. But there's one thing that they keep on doing. They delay. Not in an obvious way. Not like reckless spending or making bad money decisions. This is a lot quieter, a lot more simple than that kind of delay. This kind is the kind that hides behind logic. This person says things like, I just need to understand the thing a little bit better. Let me wait until things stabilize at work. Next month, I'll be more clear. And look, all of this sounds really responsible. It sounds like this person is being careful, avoiding unnecessary mistakes. But I want you to understand this. It's not just caution. That's not the only thing going on here. What's happening is this is actually a form of avoidance. A form of avoidance that feels like progress. And that's what makes this so very dangerous. Because nothing is breaking around them, nothing is collapsing, there is no crisis in their life. Their life just continues. Salary comes in, their spending goes out each month, and time passes. And then one day, usually much later than they've expected, they look up and they realize they've been about to start doing something they know they should for two or maybe even three years. Now listen carefully. This is where most people get it wrong. They think that their problem with money is about discipline. Or maybe it might be about knowledge. It could be even an issue around confidence, but it's not any of these things. It's not even really about hesitation. It's something a lot deeper and a lot more quiet. It's a structural problem. And if this person, a person like this, doesn't catch this structural problem early, you could lose years of financial progress without ever making a single quote bad decision. You just make no decision. Now, according to work done by the Playbook HQ and Simplifice, the financial cost of delay in decision making is lost revenue, missed opportunities, and increased expenses incurred by postponing actions that you know you should take. This is often calculated as quote the cost of delay per unit of time. It includes lost market share, diminished compound returns on investments, higher operational costs, and reduced competitiveness with others in the market. At some point, you're going to have to get on the bicycle. You're going to have to get into the water and learn how to ride and swim practically. There's only so much you can learn from a book, a course, or a podcast. Hi, I'm Isaac Nghusi, a financial literacy expert focused on decision-making architecture, with 15 years experience working with organizations, professionals, and highly capable business owners over the years. And I want to be very clear about something right from the start. The people that I've worked with over the years aren't struggling because they don't earn enough income. That at least is not the pattern that I see over the years. I work with people who are capable, they're intelligent, they earn well, but they're quietly stuck. And when you really study it, when you pay attention and strip away the surface level explanations for why this is happening and why it's so common, you start to see something very uncomfortable. They don't have a money problem. They don't even have an investment problem, technically speaking. What they have is a decision framework problem. More specifically, the problem that they have is an absence of a predefined system that tells you when to stop thinking about where your money should go and what your money should do, and you start actively doing it, walking the talk, despite the challenges that might come along the way. Now, I wanted to really sit with this. Because decision delay doesn't look dramatic. It doesn't look like it's failure. It looks pretty normal. You go to work, you get paid, you handle your responsibilities. But somewhere in the background, there are these financial decisions that you know are important. You know that investing sh will help you. You know that if you structured your money, you'd waste less of it. You know if you plan for the long term, you'll be able to achieve some of your goals for the future. But instead of handling these issues, these decisions, you don't, and they stay open. I've said this before, but open decisions are heavy. You carry them over time. You carry them quietly. You don't share them with people. They might be embarrassing. Every month, every year, you tell yourself, listen, I'll sort this out when I'm in a better position. I just need a little bit more time. I'll get serious after X happens, after I get married, after I finish school, after I get my own place, whatever after is. But here's what actually happens: you don't decide. So nothing gets locked in. And because nothing gets locked in, your money has no direction. Your money just reacts. It reacts to requests from your family and friends. It reacts to pressure. It reacts to your emotional spending. It reacts to your desires. It reacts to your appetites. And over time, that reaction becomes just your default system, how you handle money on a month-to-month basis. Always consuming in the moment, never planning and preparing for the future. Now look, let's remove any illusion here. Discipline is difficult. But this isn't exactly about that. Because if it was, you would have fixed it already, all you disciplined people. You're disciplined in other areas of your life. You show up to work every day, you meet deadlines for your employer, and you carry all manner of responsibilities as an adult, even probably as some children. So why does this one area just keep slipping and not being managed with discipline? It's because you don't have a decision handling system. Let me say it in a different way. You don't have a system that tells you when this happens, I do that. So every time a financial decision shows up, you start from zero. You start handling it in the moment. You think about it, you analyze it, you hesitate because of the relationship you have with the person asking, or the obligation you might feel, or the guilt that might be associated with a request. You feel like you're being careful by hesitating. But in reality, you're rebuilding the same decision over and over again. You're not following a plan. And over time, that can get so very exhausting. So what do most people do when something becomes mentally heavy and exhausting? They postpone. Most of us, in order to protect our mental peace, we postpone. Now, listen, I understand. I know this can feel disconnected from your daily life. It might feel philosophical. So let's make it real and practical. Let me tell you a story, a simple story, about two people. They're the same age, they're both 24 years old, and they're both starting their professional career. Both understand that saving for emergencies and investing to build assets matters profoundly over the life of their career and their personal life. So this first person, first friend, they start immediately, saving and investing. Not aggressively, not perfectly, but they just start and they stay consistent. For about six years until they're 30 years old, they save 10% of their income in an interest-earning account. Then, after six years, their life gets busy with work and family obligations. So they stop actively contributing into their fund and they use that money to responsibly and intentionally invest and build elsewhere. But the structure was already there. Now the second person, the second friend, this person waits. Not because they're careless, but because they want to do it properly. They want to get ready and start on the right foot. They want clarity, they want to feel confident, they want to know that they're starting at the right time. So this second person takes their time to get started. And six years fly by. Finally, in the right environment by their own standards, they get started six years later than their friend. And from that point on, they actually invest 10% of their income into this fund every year to catch up with the first person for longer, decades longer, with more effort, more sacrifice, more sweat equity, a lot more struggle. They're trying to catch up with their decisive friend who started six years ago. But here's the part that most people don't expect in this story. Even with all that effort, decades of saving and investing, decades of discipline, decades of consistency, they struggle to match the outcome of the person, their friend, who started earlier. Not because they were less intelligent, not because they made worse decisions, but because they spent six years without following a strict structure, it takes the second person, the delayed person, over three decades and over sixty thousand dollars to catch their friend. Over three decades and over sixty thousand dollars just to arrive at the same result. Because they spent the first six years, the initial six years, without structure and without decisiveness. Now listen, this is where all of this gets real uncomfortable. Because most people are waiting for a feeling, a feeling of confidence, a feeling of clarity, a feeling of certainty that they can't lose, they can't fail. But those things don't come before action. In fact, some of these things don't come for years. They come after structured action and over time. So what happens? If you wait to feel ready, but readiness never arrives because there's no system producing it, you stay in a loop. You think, you delay, you reset, you think again, and you start over. Over and over and over. The loop continues over years, hopefully not, but sometimes even over decades. That loop becomes your financial identity. It becomes how you deal with difficult money decisions and how you cope with financial stress. That's the system that you've become accustomed with. You become someone who is always about to start. All right. It's heavy. We've covered a lot. So what actually fixes this problem? I can tell you it's not more information. It's also not more research, not another video, another book, another content clip. What you need is a rule. A simple, non-negotiable decision rule. Something that removes the question entirely. Instead of asking, is now the right time? Should I should I start right now? Is this the best opportunity? You decide when I get money, this is what I do every month, regardless. Because once this decision is made, you stop paying the mental cost of making the same choice over and over every month or every time the choice is presented to you. For example, if a close friend asks you, can I lend some money this month? I'll pay you back in the next two weeks. Without a structure, you might feel generous that day. So you give it to them. Or you might feel pressured by your relationship to give. With a structure, you might say, Let me get back to you tomorrow. I'll need to check how much money I've got left. Thinking to yourself in my generous giving budget. Or you might say, I don't have as much as you're asking, but I can give you half of it. I can afford that. And keep it. Don't pay me back. This is my contribution to solving your problem. Or with a structure, you might also say, I'm wiped out this month from all my obligations and responsibilities. I'm really sorry you're going through this, but unfortunately, I can't help right now. If your friend is really a friend, your financial problems should matter to them as much as they want their financial problems to matter to you. If they don't and they only care that you help them, how much of a friend are they really? Take a moment to reflect on that. That is the real structural shift. You don't need more information. What you need is fewer real-time decisions. Look, most people are afraid of making the wrong choice, making the wrong move, or the consequences that come from the wrong choice. But that's not what destroys your financial progress. What destroys your financial success is inactivity. Allowing your fear of making mistakes stop you from moving at all. It's time passing without structure. The cost of not having a plan of what to do with every coin of your income and following it almost religiously. It's a quiet delay and an immensely expensive one. So I'll leave you with this. Where in your life right now are you still about to start on something that actually needed to be done a long time ago? Because that's where your real problem is. That's the real silent killer to your financial growth. Where are you on that issue that you should have started several years ago? And what structure can you build to execute it? If this conversation resonates with you, then I want you to just understand this. You don't need to be more motivated. You don't need to put more pressure on yourself. You don't even need more knowledge, technically. What you need is consistent and predictable structure with your money. Because once the structure is in place, then your decisions stop being heavy, weighted by your obligations, your hopes, your dreams, and the expectations of others. And when decisions stop being heavy, you finally start moving. You start acting on autopilot. You start taking decisions that produce results. When you succeed, you grow. When you fail, you learn and you grow. This is an excellent question from Erica here in Kigali. And it's a difficult one to deal with. If your income is instable and you are looking to make a plan, you're kind of in between a rock and a hard place. So again, I would defer to building a structure. What you need is some kind of predictable source of income. Either what you're going to do is base your life within a realistic amount of money that you earn regularly. And then anything above that is going to go towards emergency funds, is going to go towards stabilizing yourself financially speaking. But you're living on a really tight rope and a tight budget. And usually that's quite difficult to do. So truthfully, the more realistic response is that you need to find a more stable source of income and you need to find a way to reduce your expenses. So I hope that helps. But I know that a lot of us are earning inconsistent income from our contracts, from our short-term contracts, from our short-term jobs, gigs, things like this. But you can't be predictable with your spending if you're not predictable with your earning. So that that that is a tricky place to be in. And I hope that you find a stable way to earn and solve this problem once and for all, whether it is from your own business or the more permanent jobs that you can acquire. Great. Next question.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

Second question from Linda, 28, and living in Kigali. I used a loan app during a tough period, and now I'm juggling repayments. I feel embarrassed talking about it. What's the smartest way to clear debt without feeling like you failed at life?

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Oh man, this uh this debt issue, especially consumer debt, it's um it is a huge, huge issue to address. It's a huge issue issue to solve. And really what this is about, again, is discipline when it comes to taking debt, taking a loan, um, a credit card. Because if you take credit to consume, if you take debt to consume and you don't have the money in the first place, what are you going to do to recover the money that you've borrowed for consumption? I mean, you didn't even borrow to grow something, you borrowed to eat. Um, now, if you can't find more work, if you can't again, like uh in the example of uh Erica. Sorry, in the example of Eric, uh, Linda might need to really tighten her belt as well. You might need to live in an uncomfortable, maybe go back to your home. If you're not living in your home, a parent's home, or you're living with uh relatives, you might have to tighten your belt quite a bit to get out of debt. Otherwise, you're going to be living with the constant pressure that you have to pay back an amount greater than what you can afford. So you need to look at this problem from two ends. On the one end, you need to reduce how much you're spending just to stay alive, if possible. And you need to make sure that you are using as much realistically of the income that you do have to pay down your debt, especially if your debt is uh tied to some kind of asset or something that you own, or even just your reputation, which it always is. So this is this is a tough decision. It is a it's a situation born from the way we use debt. And when you're in it, you kind of have to really struggle to get out of it. There is no comfortable answer. You're going to have to be in a tight leash regardless. Um, but definitely you can help yourself by not making it worse and stop borrowing and learn how to live on a tighter financial schedule so that you can get out of this situation. Thanks for your question.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

Last question from Grace 35 and living in Dar Salam. I've been working nonstop for years to build financial security, but I'm exhausted. When does chasing financial stability become unhealthy? How do you define enough?

SPEAKER_01 23:50

Wow, Grace, what an existential question. When is enough enough? Or what is enough for that matter? Excellent question, Grace. This is something that we all have to determine individually. Some of us believe enough is uh retiring on a quiet farm by the lake and having a cup of coffee with a special one every evening or going for a walk uh and owning your own lake house or or or a farmhouse. Some of that for some people that's enough. And for other people, enough is non-existent, to put it simply. Um you need to determine internally what is important to you. And one of the reasons why enough becomes elusive is that we never take the time to sit down and ask ourselves what we really want. What is really important? Not just what would be nice to have, but what's really important to me. And at what point will I stop my hustle in order to enjoy what's really important? And we hear these conversations all the time. The most important things to human beings is relationships with significant others, with their family and children, with extended family members and friends, time spent in relationships. Um, there's a lot of data out there about what's most fulfilling to human beings, and it tends to be relationships. But all of us have to make these decisions on our own. What I would suggest, sit down and write down what is important to you, how much it costs for you to get that, and what would make you satisfied, and focus on being grateful for that. Otherwise, the hunt can be endless. You will achieve and achieve and achieve endlessly and never really feel satisfied. So know what you want. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that today's conversation has given you some of the tools that you need to create the life you want with your money. If you have any questions you'd also like answered, feel free to send them to our email, themoneyblueprintpodcast at gmail.com. You can also reach out to us on our social media platforms. Have a great week.

SPEAKER_00 26:04

This podcast is for general informational and educational purposes only, and does not provide financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. Do not make decisions before consulting a qualified professional. This podcast is brought to you by LF Media, home of great African podcasts.