How Financial Discipline Saved Our Marriage
- Samuel Kingori
- May 1
- 2 min read
It was 1991. My wife stood up at 2 a.m., holding our firstborn.
Ann had had enough.
We had argued again. About money. About school fees, we could not find. About the bills piling up on the small table in our sitting room. She picked up Betty, who was barely a toddler, and said she was leaving. At 2 am.
I remember what I said. I said, “Please do not leave. I have faith things will work out.”
I did not have a plan. I only had faith. And a payslip that was not enough.
I was a young professional in Nairobi. I was earning. On paper, I was doing fine. In truth, I was broke every month-end. I borrowed from Benson. I borrowed from Peter. I borrowed from Michael. I would walk into work on Monday morning holding a cup of tea I could barely afford, wondering what was wrong with me. Why the salary kept coming and the money kept disappearing. Why did other men seem to know something I did not?
This went on for four years.☕
Then in 1995, I was attached to a project where I met a man called Gathenge.
He took me to breakfast at a hotel I would never have walked into on my own. He did not lecture me. He did not sell me anything. He just asked me questions. Where should he take his son to study engineering. What did I think about certain investments. Ordinary questions, over eggs and coffee, in a place too expensive for the man I was at the time.
Somewhere in that breakfast, he mentioned that his rental income was Ksh 1.5 million per month. In 1995. This was financial discipline on another level.
I did not say anything. But something inside me broke open.
Not jealousy. Something quieter. I had never in my life met a man who had built that kind of financial life from the ground up.
I did not know it was possible for someone like me. For the first time, I could see that the problem was not my salary. The problem was that I was trying to build a life I had never seen anyone build.
Gathenge did not know it, but that one breakfast stretched my imagination by 20 years in two hours.
That is when the turn began.
The years after were not easy. Discipline takes time. Plans take time. Mistakes take time to unlearn. But I had finally seen what was possible, and a man who has seen cannot unsee.
I think about Ann standing in our sitting room at 2am sometimes. I think about what would have happened if I had met a Gathenge in 1991 instead of 1995. Four years of her tears. Four years of my borrowing. Four years I can never give her back.🕊️
There is a man reading this right now who is 42. He earns Sh 200,000. After loans, SACCO, HELB, school fees, and the Ksh 20,000 he sends upcountry, he is left with 25,000. He is taking digital loans by day 25. On Sunday night, he tells his wife he is sorry. He walks into work on Monday, wondering what is wrong with him.
I know that man. I was that man.
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