Inflation has to be the hottest topic of discussion almost over Ghana right now because of the unstable prices of goods. Real life prices of goods are acting like extremely volatile cryptocurrencies because you can buy from a store right now for X cedis and come back the next to buy the same thing for x + half X. Seriously.
I guess we should be thankful though. It was a lot worse a few months back. And when I say worse, I mean it was reallly bad. The dollar was sitting at around 16cedis and hell broke loose in Ghana because traders just got their excuse to shoot prices of goods to the moon.
The funny thing is I was telling Rubilu earlier today is that the way inflation works is like karma. If you increase transport fare because fuel went up and refuse to reduce when it comes down, the bread seller on the roadside will keep giving you 1 loaf of bread for 10cedis too because she’s paying the transport fare you asked. Basically, if you try to exploit people with inflation as an excuse, it’ll come back and bite you in the ass is what I’m saying.
Anyways enough of the rant. In times like this, everyone has a coping mechanism. Mine is not soo many things. I’ll be talking about a few things I do or am about to start doing to beat inflation and manage my expenses.
Buy early
With the high inflation right now, things will keep getting more and more expensive and one way to avoid having to buy that cylinder of gas for 50cedis next month is to buy it for 45today.
Like 2 years back, I had enough money to buy a bike and hesitated because of one or two reasons. The bike cost 6.5k at the time. I shit you not when I tell you that today, the same bike is selling at around 13k and the difference between the me now and back then is that I neither have a bike nor money equivalent to get one.
I regret not buying the bike every single day because now is when I really need it.
Buy in bulk
A secret when it comes to saving money when buying things is to buy in bulk. Why I say this is obvious - buying in bulk gives you discounts. And I’m not even talking about the buy 1 get 1 free type of discounts.
I’m talking about how a single sachet of pure water is GHC 0.3 but a pack that contains 30 pieces of sachets is somewhere around GHC 7. The GHC 2 difference between buying the entire pack at once and buying the sachets in pieces every time you want to drink water is huge. You might not realize it by looking at just one pack, but let’s take a look at what it totals to over an entire year!
explore your options. Scout for different prices.
This one is something I only recently started. I started practicing it after a friend of mine shared the story of how he was almost sold a certain drug for twice it’s actual value at a shop in his area.
He took a sick relative to a hospital and was asked to buy said drug. Just outside the hospital, there was a local pharmacy and the drugs here were expensive!
He felt like he was getting ripped off and decided to explore his options. He visited several drug stores, far from the hospital and discovered he was actually right.
I guess in his case, the drugs were more expensive in the hospital just outside the hospital because it was closest to the hospital. But still, he got them for cheaper, even with the cost of petrol he used to look around.
Until you look around, you don’t know a true measure or an average of how much whatever you’re looking for actually costs. It’ll surprise you the differences in prices of goods in the same market.
The reality is that inflation will always be a thing. But we don’t have to sit around and let it swallow us whole. We can do a few things like the above to stay on top of inflation and beat the system.
all images here are mine and shot on an iPhone 11 Pro Max
