Financial Discipline Among Youth Entrepreneurs
In your view, what are the challenges that youth entrepreneurs face in maintaining financial descipline in their enterprises. In what way can facilitators assist the youth to overcome these challages.--nkl 09:53, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
Hello Naomy,
Pressure from Family and Friends who may want credit facilities or free services are some of the challenges youth entrepreneurs face in maintaining financial discipline. Also, poor knowledge of financial management may result in youth entrepreneurs not knowing the difference between funds for business and personal funds.
Facilitators should ensure participants are exposed to practical training experiences that will teach the youth entrepreneur the benefits of financial discipline.
youth entrepreneurs face some challenges like, timing in terms of what has been invested can not be used to raise back the input. the remedy for this would be once investments have been commited to then a lot of consetration towards work must be enfasised. also calculations on issues of costing. The other challenge is inpouse buying, this means buying things that are not budgeted for at the time of purchases. solution to this would be that youths stick to the budgetlines and learn burgaining skills. peer presure is one item, but the youth here is need to be self controlled. as friends never end but once business comes to stop then you are fired! haha.
some youth entrepreneurs luck financial literacy and i think that's one of the major challenges to them.once they have knowledge about finance, i think they are able to maintain financial discipline.
Hi all
What i have captured here is that the main challenges in financial descipline is lack of knowledge and pressure from family and friends, in addition the influence of peers plays a critical role.
Lintini,
While I agree that pressure from other competing needs and influence to (mis)use business finances is a major cause of financial indiscipline in enterprises, poor planning is the root cause of the problem. Of course an enterprenuer must cover personal expenses out of the business, since the goal of any business is to raise the living standards of the enterprenuer, but these should be planned expenses after doing the accounts and determining what the profit is.
The best way that facilitators can assist in this is by making sure that the enterprenuers are capacitated to establish what is "business money", "re-investment money", and "disposable profits"- speaking in lay man's language.
This way, the enterprenuers will know what to use and what to retain as business working capital
Hi Naomy,
Youths and even adults face challenges in maintaining financial discipline due to poor planning and the pressure to live off the profits on a daily basis. A lot of young people don't have a long term perspective to life, so they tend to use business funds indiscriminately. However there are also genuine competing demands like sickness, family needs etc. Facilitators can support them in enlightening them on the need to sustain the business so that it can sustain the same needs in the future.--Smauye 13:32, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
Some of the challenges youth entrepreneurs face in maintaining financial discipline in their enterprises lack of an entrepreneurial culture. Most young people do not appreciate entrepreneurship from a tender age and hence to learn to be disciplined at an older age becomes achallenge.
Facilitators can help by highlighting the consequences of lacjk of discipline, but also by sharing success stories of role models
Hi all, I think peer pressure is a challenge to maintaining financial discipline among youth entrepreneurs. Facilitators should impress upon youth entrepreneurs to remain focus and also cite examples of success stories of entrepreneurs young entrepreneurs.
Hi
One major challenge that faces youth entrepreneurs in as far as financial discipline is concerned is the issue of separating business finances and personal finances. Most youths end up mixing up the two i.e. using business finances to sort out personal financial problems. This results in no proper accounting for the money that is coming in and out of the business with the consequence of no accurate way of measuring the success of the business and - in a worst case scenario - results in the business going bust/bankrupt. Facilitators can assist youths by advising to keep personal finances separate from business finances. Any personal financial issues need to be sorted out without involving the business.
