Ep271: Oluwatosin Olaseinde – Africa’s Financial Literacy Queen Says Be Careful Who You Trust

Andrew Stotz 00:04
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community we know that to win an investing, you must take risk but to win big, you've got to reduce it. This episode is sponsored by a Stotz Academy which offers online courses to help investors better manage their stock portfolios, aspiring professionals to learn to value any company in the world business leaders to make their companies financially world class and even beginners to implement a simple lifetime investment plan. Go to my worst investment ever.com to get free access to my short course. Sick six ways to lose your money and six strategies to win where I share the six lessons I've learned from all of these podcast interviews. Fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz and I'm here with featured guests. Towson, Allah say in de Towson. Are you ready to rock? What did you say? Are you ready to rock?

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 01:11
Yes, I am ready to rock Let's go. I know

Andrew Stotz 01:14
you are and I know because I see you rocking it every day on Instagram videos. So I've been trying to get you on the show. And I'm so happy to have you and let me introduce you to the audience. tosun is a professional accountant with over 10 years of experience spanning across accounting, audit, financial management and taxation. She is the founder and CEO of money Africa and edtech platform that enhances financial literacy and investments and investments leveraging on technology. tosun is a Washington Mandela fellow. She was a finalist at the future awards in 2019. She was selected as one of the top 100 women by the leading ladies Africa. She was awarded one of the top eight traders by CNBC Africa in 2012. And he is a member of the golden key international Honor Society. tosun has spoken at TEDx, and is featured on BBC UK, I'll just use Guardian as well as others. And of course, you can hear her and see her every day on money Africa on Instagram. But Towson take a minute and Philly for the tidbits about your life.

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 02:29
So money Africa started as a passion project. We just wanted to teach people about money, I got my first degree at age of 20. And even though I was an accountant, I struggled with my money. I was leaving from hand to mouth. So I wanted to change that for other people who didn't have to make the same mistakes I did. So after learning about money, right, and dyslexia is a Nigerian speaks and wanted to speak to the Nigerian market using the same languages and the same examples, things that he can relate to. And that's what we did. So we have over 4000 subscribers on our platform, and reached over 100,000 people online and offline. I'm really excited about it.

Andrew Stotz 03:08
That is exciting. I'm curious, when you started it, you probably had some vision. But in reality, things went a different direction. But we're successful. I'm curious, what did you think you were going to be doing with it versus what you are doing? Or was it straight on target?

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 03:25
To be very honest, it wasn't really just a hobby. So I just opened an Instagram page, and I just wanted to share my lessons with people, right? I just turned 30. And I was like, gosh, you know, I made so much so many mistakes. And when I was much younger, I just wanted to teach people and I just had posted on like wildfire 1000 followers, then we so 5000 followers, and we saw 10,000 followers, then Instagram had only one minute videos, you couldn't do more than that. Right? So they were like, Oh, we want more or less go on this have courses webinars, you know, let's have physical classes. So in all honesty, I did not see grow this way. It really just happened, the markets responded positively. And we were responding to them as well and just connect kept creating products for them.

Andrew Stotz 04:11
You know, I can totally picture there because, I mean, here I am in little Bangkok. And I really know nothing about Nigeria, and certainly about the Nigeria market, although I'm learning a lot these days, as I was talking about with you before, but but but what I can say is that when I saw you on the video, it just, you know, it makes you just want to stand up and cheer. Because you know, you bring so much energy, so much passion to what you're doing. And you know, sometimes, you know, you're just talking about bank earnings, but you know, you still bring that energy and passion to it. And so I always try to make a comment like whoa, yes, awesome. So I can imagine that it's growing because I think you do have a lot of passion. And I think you share that with the audience. So that's also one of the reasons why I wanted to get you on the show to share some of that passion with my audience.

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 05:03
He I'm very excited to be here.

Andrew Stotz 05:06
Yeah, well, so let's get started. Well, now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one ever goes into their worst investment thinking it will be. Tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it. And then tell us your story.

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 05:20
Oh, fantastic. So this was in 2017. And at this time of the year, right, the Bitcoin was gaining so much momentum, at the beginning of the year was like $2,000. And it was $3,000. And he kept growing. Now remember our straight accounts, and I only I know about basically, and I know the stock market and all this other thing, but preconscious on it very futuristic. It's not a very abstract, I just didn't understand it. Now I had a friend. And he always tells me about his when I made so much money on this, I did that I did that I wanted a piece of the pie, right. So what I was accustomed to our mutual funds, your stocks I didn't know about because I didn't understand it. So I was leaning on my friend knowledge, right, he kept telling me about all his wins. And then in the midst of it all, it went from 2000 to 5000. I remember when it hits $10,000, I said, I can't wait anymore I need to get in. So I reached out to him. And I said, Listen, I want into some of this pie. And it was like definitely that's not a problem we can get you in now at this point, I think a Bitcoin now was about $18,000 were about. So I handed over a large sum of money and drew a huge sum of money to this person to help me invest because I thought Bitcoin was so futuristics, I can understand it, I wouldn't know how to navigate it. And I needed to actually speak to this person that actually knows how to go about it. And you do not want to know what happened afterwards, you do not want to understand. So now he set up this platform. And he has told me that he has put my money into it. So I said I stock in the numbers on a daily basis. Oh my gosh, it's not that's in five are so happy that I'm also making so much when I was so excited. And we chatting up on WhatsApp and giving updates like the market is not doing well, you know, the investment is growing. And all of that, you know, so, so, so excited about this investments. The next year came this was now in January 2018. Right? Unfortunately, the market was tired of the rise. Although it almost kissed $20,000 that is the Bitcoin, he said that's what he did. And at this point, I was thinking about an exit. So that way I can take some profits, you sort of know that from the stock market, buy low, sell high, that is time to actually exit, you know, and take some profits. So I reached out to my friend and I said, Listen, I'm ready to sell. And he said sell once and I'm ready to sell my Bitcoin and he said no way you wanted to invest. You wanted a horizon of one year, I said, guess what things change. People change their mind, people can choose to exit. If I wanted to exit from the stock market and I changed my mind. There's a possibility to exit. And guess what? It started becoming stories and stories that send messages, and I'll get no response. And I wait and wait and wait. So at this point, I said, I asked him, I said What's going on? What am I going to get my money back? I plan to invest on it. And I know that to make some profit and where is the profit? I can't see the profit. And I said, asking where is my money, I actually now want to see proof of you invest in it. When I asked to actually see the proof of it been invested. In actual fact, I drew there was no investments. I made the biggest mistake ever, by not only my assets, I literally trusted someone else on my asset on my behalf because I thought I did not have the knowledge to actually invest in it myself. Hmm.

Andrew Stotz 09:09
And how did you feel what was the day or the moment when you just realize it was gone? It wasn't real.

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 09:17
When he stopped responding, and it was like two weeks non stop. And I reached out to mutual friends like you know, listen, this is what this person is doing. And you know, they just don't have any answer for me. I've done my due diligence, you know, I know this person very well, the person knows me. I couldn't believe it that they would actually, you know, just go away with my money was shocked. It was quite mad. It was a lack of trust. It was also a lot of I was also very angry with myself that I should have known better, right? Like, why did I trust them with this? I understand the power of actually owning your asset. I don't own it. So even if I were to go to the courts, like It Wasn't I didn't own the asset itself, right. So it was an issue just To transfer. So, yeah, Andrew was very painful, I was very angry. And lots of emotion. Actually lots of lots. There were so much anger, I remember also being so angry having to report to mutual friends, right having to put myself in that light. The truth is nobody loves to be cheated. Nobody loves to make mistakes, it makes you look stupid makes you look feel foolish. I felt really foolish that you know, in something that I understood, so well how investment work? How did I make this colossal mistake? So it was very painful? Very, very, actually, as I'm telling this story now, it's actually very painful that actually made me.

Andrew Stotz 10:38
Yeah. All right. So tell us what lessons did you learn?

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 10:43
Yeah, I learned a lot of lessons. And number one lesson is, financial literacy is very important. And we always say financial literacy is great. However, when it comes to certain sectors, we feel or you know, maybe it's very technology driven. And you know, it's for traders and things like that. But the truth is, the concept is the same field, right? So when I get invested in a savings account, investment in shares, you invested in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, the knowledge still is, has to be the same, you have to understand number one, how it works. And number two, how to access it. So it was number one, the fact that I didn't know I thought it was very complicated, I thought it was very technical, right, I overestimated the difficulty of actually getting into it. And in retrospect, all I needed to do was just to download an app and do it myself. Right. So I overestimated the entry cases, right? That was my number one biggest problem. Number two was that I did not have ownership of the asset, when you do not own the asset, you cannot control the resources. So I outsource the ownership to other people. So always documented, if you can get your lawyers to sign it, you know, because if I don't own the asset was the turqoise. I might as well play water into an empty basket. So that was what happened, I did not have ownership of it. Right? I outsource the ownership of I couldn't have proof of ownership. Then the third, why was the trust, I trust that the wrong people, right. So even if it was a bad contract we did if you do if you have a bad contract, but you do with a good person, right? It's possible for that for you to actually followed through. So the trust, right, I trusted the wrong person. And then they disappointed me, right. So next time, try building procedures, you know, at the end of the day, people actually call so always have procedures to actually be able to support yourself should the case they go on? Yeah, I trusted the wrong person.

Andrew Stotz 12:46
Well, well, let me summarize what I took away from your story. And then let me know if I missed anything. The first thing that I want to highlight is what you said right at the beginning, which is you had a friend that talked about his winners. And as I always teach, you know, people love to talk about the winners. I mean, you'd think that everybody's a multi millionaire, if you just listen to everybody talking about their investments. The fact is, is people do not talk about their overall portfolio or about the stocks that went wrong or the investments that went wrong. And so it's no wonder that so many people go into the stock market thinking that they're going to get rich. So that's the first thing. But I think that, you know, I'm going to go through the six common mistakes that I've found people make, and then we're going to just kind of go through the checklist and see how you did. So the first most common mistake is people failed to do their research. And I'd say in this case, you probably failed to do your research. The second one is they failed to properly, properly assess and then manage risk. Now, really, I would say your big mistake, as you've already mentioned, is it anytime for anybody out there who's investing, never put your money in under someone else's name or into someone else's account, any investment must be in your name. Now, that's even if you're investing in a mutual fund company, you're going to be putting your money into their bank account. And then they're going to be you know, they'll have your name represented there. But that's also a licensed entity. Yeah, generally stay focused on licensed entities and licensed people if you can. Sometimes you can't. But the main thing is never hand over your assets. The minute you hand over your assets to someone else, and it's not in your name, you can just consider it gone. And you'll be lucky if she was a trustworthy person and it came back number three, driven by emotion or flawed thinking. Well, you know, here we have two parts emotion. Yeah, definitely. You were sucked in by the excitement of watching it go up. I mean, you it was a frenzy. Yes. It was a frenzy. It was an exciting moment. And the second one is flawed thinking. You also in this case. You missed the point that you could have just done it yourself.

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 15:04
Absolutely. And so you said,

Andrew Stotz 15:06
as you said, You've overestimated how difficult it was. And then but you know, sometimes you're busy and you got a lot of other things. And this person knows it. I mean, why do I need to spend all this time. But Ladies and gentlemen, if it's your money, and you've worked hard for it, take time to get it right. Now, number four, is the most fourth most common mistake that I've found is misplaced trust. And here we have that, right. And it's hard, you know, because the person in this case was someone that was connected with people that you knew, you know, you felt comfortable with it, you know, and all that. But in fact, ultimately, he wasn't to be trusted. And number five is failed to monitor their investment. And it's not so much of a problem in this case. But there is one aspect of it that's important. When you put your money in a bank or an account or an asset management account or something like that. Generally, what they do is they mail you an account statement every month. And the purpose of that is also to detect fraud within that organization. If for some reason you don't receive your monthly statement, it could mean something's being intercepted in some way or another. So there's this idea of monitoring on a regular basis. But the good news is, you didn't make mistake number six invested in a startup company. You've done that part really well. There's a lot of different things that you I think that this brings to light. But let's now Is there anything you'd add to what I said?

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 16:41
I think you've covered it all in terms of basically ownership, understanding it not overestimated the difficulties of going into it. And I think I'm very happy that a lot of people, you know, you said something quite interesting. You said a lot of people talk about their wins, right? Not a lot of people talk about their loss. So before I came on the show today, I'm thinking to myself, Oh, my gosh, your financial literacy experts, you know, is it okay for you to talk about this. But if we do not share the stories, then people wouldn't realize that you know, what, this is some mistakes, and we shouldn't be making that. And another thing is that many times people think, Oh, I'm too intelligent to ever make this mistake. And it can actually happen to anyone. So that's why we have to be very aware, lots of awareness, lots of checking the tick boxes, like am I covered this? Am I covered that, you know, and you're just always constantly checking it to be able to ensure that you're covering all your bases?

Andrew Stotz 17:29
You know, and one of the things it's, you know, fascinating about this show is, I get so many rejections when I asked some prominent people to come on the show. One guy just rejected me today. And he says, great, great idea, not my style. Yeah, that guy's style probably is talking about his winners. And the other thing that I highlight is, you know, since I was involved with CFA, and have a CFA charter, I've had a lot of friends that were in CFA, that were presidents of CFA societies and others, and they've shared the mistakes that they've made. And they've said, you know, I've never really told anybody this. And I felt ashamed of the fact that I made this mistake when I'm a prominent person in the field. So my hat's off to you and to the others on the show that have taken the time. And I would argue that, you know, for the listeners out there, if you want to get advice, if you want to learn if you want to get better in the world of investing, listen to tosun, because she's a person that is willing to look at her mistakes, and evaluate them. So that's my little advice. So based on what you've learned from this story, and what you continue to learn, what one action would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 18:49
Number one, education is very critical. Number two, find out all you need to know about it's like very, very important. Number three, ask all the trusted prior to them. I just want people to have insights that you're not aware of. So don't be ashamed. I think we need to get off this fact that we need to know everything. Or this whole, many people still find investing as a very secretive conversation. I remember when I went out to dinner at once with friends. We're talking about how much they end and how they invested. A lot of people cringe, especially in developing economies, and especially as women, we've been raised to always see it as a very arm does something you say out in the public, you know, it's just money in a very harsh, harsh, like a kind of a silence kind of thing. So we need to stop that. If you don't talk about listening, you wouldn't understand it better, you wouldn't have access to people to have better knowledge about it. So be very comfortable to have the money conversations. And it's okay, we've made mistakes talk about it. How can you get better, I have to be very deliberate of getting yourself back on the right track. So guys, no shame, no silence. It's your money. You have every right to know where it goes and how it works.

Andrew Stotz 19:51
Great advice. And one last thing for the audience out there. You know, I've given a scholarship to a large number of women for the women evaluation scholarship and many of them also came from Towson in her relationships in Nigeria. And I just want to give a shout out to the large number of women in my evaluation masterclass and in the women evaluation from Nigeria, so let's give Three cheers to them.

20:17
Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 20:21
All right. So last question. What's your number one goal for the next 12 months,

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 20:27
growth, growth and lots and lots of growth. We want to grow our numbers, we want to subscribe more people, we want to reach the ends of Nigeria, everywhere in Africa, just talking about financial literacy. That is our priority for the next 12 months.

Andrew Stotz 20:40
Beautiful, beautiful, I can't wait to talk in 12 months and see how it's going. I'm sure. It's gonna be amazing. Well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. Remember to go to my worst investment ever.com to get free access to my short course six ways to lose your money and six strategies to win. As we conclude, Towson, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. And on behalf of a stocks Academy. I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Oluwatosin Olaseinde 21:19
Guys, don't stop dreaming those stop putting in the effort. I know we always talk about investment and money but at the end of the day is actually living a fulfilling and purposeful life and both of them can actually happen together. Thank you so much for having me here.

Andrew Stotz 21:32
We appreciate it. And you're a great example of the combination of a purposeful life and successful investing. So that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.