Shally Ashimi-Alonge: Here’s How I Learned to Save Myself

“Save yourself first.” I read those words for the first time in 2015. I was in my early 20s when I realised I was going downhill. I had no money and was responsible for meeting everyone else’s financial needs: mum, brother, groceries, and the house. 

Earlier that week, I received a memo from the office demanding a new dress code: covered shoes and business suits were to be the norm starting the following week. I stared at the letter and cried until my pillow was filled with tears. I was slowly becoming frustrated. I was earning $120 a month, my account balance was about $20, and I couldn’t afford a pair of good shoes. I had been working for two years and had no backup funds, savings, or investments. 

My only cash of $20 was saved for harder days – days when my friend, Yimi, was indisposed. She stayed ten minutes away from my house and had a Jeep that saved my life on most days. We both worked as auditors for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a job I had a love-hate relationship with. Most of our work hours were spent sitting in an open space — our office was an open space with only chairs — whiling away time and serving cautionary letters or tax penalty letters from the government to companies. 

My IRS job had a seasonal routine; the first and last quarters were filled with lazy time and zero work. These were the times you would want to pull out your hair to be sane, especially if you were 22 and boisterous. During these times, we didn’t have enough companies to audit, and recruits were onboarded into the system, which meant we had more ideal timing and lots of new rules. I was frustrated about my finances, my life, and my job when I heard the term, ‘Save yourself.’ 

In her TedTalk, Arsha Jones says that frustration is the first step in saving yourself. After two years of feeling helpless, I learned my first lesson: no one was coming to save me – no king, wealthy boyfriend, or government grant.

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I had a hobby at university that made my life a little bit more complex. I loved Mills and Boons. Stories about sultry, hot men with six-packs walking slowly out of the swimming pool, water dripping, flipping their hair back and forth, ready to save a young damsel had enthralled and brainwashed me. I wanted to be saved. But two years piled up and no one had come to save me (or was it yet?). 

I was brought back to reality when I read my first finance book. No one is going to save you, you are in this alone, and everything is on you. This lesson was harder for me because I wasn’t born poor, but life happened. And I knew we had gotten to the danger zone when my mum sold her gold jewellery, clothes, rings, and almost everything else to take us through university. Despite this, I still hoped that one day someone would come into our lives and help—that someone was coming to save us. I learned the hard way that no one was coming to save me from my job, responsibilities, or bad habits. No one. 

Saving Yourself 101 

My first finance book was a call to be somewhat selfish — to wear the oxygen mask before I wore it for others. To ensure I paid myself first by saving, learning, and creating before spending my entire income helping others, my family and myself. But isn’t it selfish to put yourself first? To save yourself from the demands of the family who had sacrificed everything and never saved themselves to somehow save you. I sometimes wonder. But I have found that the only way to save others is to first do it for yourself. 

It takes changing your mentality, which is Arsha Jones’s second step to coming out of a rut. While she says that the focus of this step is believing, I think it also has to do with uprooting – weeding out beliefs that do not serve us. One of them, for me, was the belief that giving all I had to my family was a debt I had to pay.

It took realizing that the only way out of poverty is to swim on your own to a safe place to calm your desire to save everyone. If not, you will eventually save no one, including yourself. Without realising it, poverty becomes systemic because the one person who has made a small breakthrough out of poverty becomes the lifeline for others, and they can’t move beyond a certain box in life. As their income grows, so do their dependents and needs. And we are left in a pool of problems, trying to constantly save ourselves and others. 

Viola Davis, in her book, “Finding Me”, reflects on the constant request to take care of her parents, sisters, and sisters’ children: ‘I thought I could save them. I thought my money and success could save all of them. I learned the hard way that when there are underlying issues, money does nothing. Money exacerbates the problem because it takes away the individual’s ability to be held accountable.’ Some problems are systemic, and we need to solve the root of the problem, not just the immediate need. 

How do you solve a family problem of dependency? How do you create room for independence and help others become financially independent? To want our loved ones to be accountable. To build boundaries. It’s a difficult business to love and not always want to be a saviour. And it is, in many ways, needed.

For me, that meant giving for growth, not for wants or needs. It meant saving a percentage of your income no matter what, then directing it toward funding a business, a new career, or an education that allows others to grow. It meant giving them the confidence and capability to save themselves. This lesson isn’t just applicable to finance; I’ve seen it in marriage, love, relationships, and friendships. 

In these scenarios, we learn that we can’t save abusive spouses unless we first create space for ourselves to heal, often without them. We can’t truly make someone happy without learning what happiness is to us or being happy. Simply put, we can’t give what we do not have. We can’t give our children love if we haven’t loved ourselves. We can’t save others if we haven’t saved ourselves. 

Shalewa Ashimi-Alonge passed away on May 11, 2023. This personal essay is published in her honour and to celebrate her posthumous birthday today.