Your Money Is Wasting. You Just Cannot See It.

Sola Adesakin

October 27, 2026

There is a slow, invisible theft happening in your bank account right now and you are not even aware of it. Every month, your salary arrives. Every month, it disappears. Not into investments, or into assets, or into anything that will exist six months from now. It disappears into what I call the leak rate, the collection of small, unintentional, largely forgettable expenses that quietly consume money that could have been building something.

We talked about finding the leaks. Today I want to talk about what you do with the money once you plug them. Because finding them is only half the work. Redirecting them is where your financial life actually changes.

But first, let me address the thing most people do with whatever money they manage to hold onto. They leave it in a savings account. And they feel responsible for doing so. After all, it is saved, is it not?

It is saved, but it is also wasting.

A standard savings account in Nigeria pays you somewhere between 2% and 4% annually. Meanwhile, inflation is running significantly higher than that. What this means in practical terms is that the N200,000 sitting in your savings account today will buy less in twelve months than it buys right now. The number on your screen stays the same. The purchasing power behind it shrinks. You are not growing money. You are watching it quietly lose value in slow motion while the bank uses it to make real returns elsewhere.

A money market mutual fund changes that equation entirely.

Money market funds invest your contributions in short-term, low-risk instruments. Treasury bills, commercial papers, bank placements. The same instruments wealthy individuals and institutions use to park money while keeping it accessible. The returns are meaningfully higher than a savings account, often reaching double digits depending on the fund and the interest rate environment. Your money is managed by a licensed, SEC-regulated fund manager. And critically, it remains accessible. You are not locking it away for years. You are putting it somewhere it actually works while it waits.

The difference over a year is not trivial. N200,000 in a savings account at 3% earns you N6,000 in a year. The same N200,000 in a money market fund earning 12% gives you N24,000. That is four times the return on the same money. Now multiply that across every month you redirect your leak rate, and the gap becomes a genuinely meaningful number.

Here is what I want you to do.

Go through your last three months of bank statements this weekend. Identify the recurring expenses you would not intentionally choose again if someone asked you to recommit to them today. The subscriptions running in the background. The delivery habit that crept from occasional to weekly. The impulse purchases you barely remember making. Add them up. That total is your leak rate.

Now take half of it. Not all. Half. And set up an automatic transfer on payday, before lifestyle absorbs it, into a money market mutual fund. Not into another savings account. Not into a fixed deposit you will break in two months. Into a money market fund where the money earns a real return and remains accessible when you need it.

The reason this works is not just mathematical, it is behavioural. Money that has a destination behaves differently from money that is floating. When your salary arrives and a portion immediately moves into an investment account, what remains is what you have to work with. You adjust. You spend within what is left. And the portion that moved is now growing instead of leaking. You did not earn more. You simply kept more of what you already earned and put it somewhere it is treated with respect.

Do this for six months. That is all I am asking. Six months of redirecting half your leak rate into a money market fund on payday. Watch your balance grow. Watch the returns accumulate. Watch how it feels to have money working for you instead of disappearing into things you cannot even recall buying.

Your savings account is not saving you. It is a waiting room where money sits and loses value. A money market fund is a workspace where money goes and earns its keep.

Stop leaving your money where it wastes. Move it to where it works.

The redirect starts this payday, not next month.

About Author

Sola Adesakin

Sola Adesakin is a highly respected wealth coach and chartered accountant with over two decades of transformative impact in the finance industry. As the visionary founder of Smart Stewards Financial Advisory Limited and Smart Stewards Advisory LLC, she has revolutionized the financial wellbeing of countless individuals and businesses across 40 countries. Her methodical approach to ‘make-manage-multiply’ money principles has elevated many from financial stress to prosperity, and mediocrity to exceptional achievement.