Did you know I was scammed? Yep, the Money Guru was scammed! This happened on a few occasions but I am going to share with you the most recent instance. Let me tell you all about it. 

Back in 2020, my family moved back to Jamaica to hide out during the pandemic and to also get some help with my son who was 18 months at the time as well. So we were living in Jamaica for about 15 months and of course, during this time we needed to do our day-to-day transactions. Prior to that, all our transactions were being done in Canada. After a while we decided to choose a local bank to conduct our transactions, so we got Jamaican-based debit cards and began using these debit cards locally. 

Now, I make it a habit to check my accounts at least every other day and my husband routinely does his check first thing in the morning. This man doesn’t play when it comes to his money! 

So one day we noticed a suspicious transaction from an overseas charity for CAD $1075, and right away we checked in with each other to find out if either of us was aware of the charges. Because we were using the card in Jamaica and online we weren’t sure if it was possibly a subscription or a vendor charge. We began doing email checks, but couldn’t connect it to anything and this made us even more suspicious, so we flagged it right away to the bank who then escalated it to VISA and we were reimbursed for that money. Now it wasn’t right away, took about 2 months but we got back the money.

So why did I share this story with you? Well simply put, if you don’t know your money and you are not periodically and regularly checking in on your account balances, transactions, and the types of investments you have, then you are opening yourself up to the risk of being scammed, and it can sometimes go unnoticed. Had we not been checking our accounts on a regular basis we would have missed that something was off and that scammer could have attempted to make an even larger transaction at another time. We all know from recent fraud and scam allegations that having a large sum of money taken from your account is a very unfortunate and painful situation, case in point Usain Bolt. 

The lesson in all of this is to know your money and make it a habit to regularly check your accounts and investments. Make sure you know what charges are on your accounts and what transactions are going through your different accounts because if you are not doing your regular checks your money can’t grow. We also need to monitor our investment performance, because if the investments are not performing then some investment changes need to be done. You can’t become wealthy with underperforming investments. 

That’s the kind of work we do with our clients when we are onboarding them. The first thing we do is to have them go through an audit and budget exercise for themselves so they can get intimate with their money. 

Now, believe it or not, a lot of clients are shocked and flabbergasted even when they see clearly where they are with their finances. However, this is the foundation if you want to grow your money and once we start the work on what activities need to be taken to grow your money then clients start to feel empowered because they can finally see how easy it is to grow their money and even to become a millionaire.

Did my story hit home for you? Were you scammed also? Did you get your money back? What are you doing now to prevent a recurrence? Reply/comment and tell me all about it, I look forward to hearing your story.