Bola Sokunbi - Choosing to Prosper: Triumphing Over Adversity, Breaking Out of Comfort Zones, Achieving Your Life and Money Dreams

Bola Sokunbi

Copyright 2022 by Bola Sokunbi. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data is Available:

ISBN 9781119827368 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781119827382 (ePDF)

ISBN 9781119827375 (ePub)

Cover Design: Joyce Teo

Cover Image: Angelito Jusay

This book is dedicated to the women in my family who came before me and set the stage for who I am and what I have accomplished today. To my grandmothers, my aunties, and my incredible mother. Thank you. I also dedicate this book to every woman choosing to prosper, and I hope my story and my journey so far serves as inspiration.

Bola Sokunbi is a certified financial education instructor (CFEI), investor, finance expert, speaker, podcaster, influencer, and the founder and CEO of Clever Girl Finance, a personal finance platform created to empower women to achieve real wealth and live life on their own terms.

She started Clever Girl Finance in 2015 to provide women with the tools and resources she wished she had when she began her financial journey.

She is also the author of the bestselling books Clever Girl Finance: Ditch Debt, Save Money, and Build Real Wealth; Clever Girl Finance: Learn How Investing Works, Grow Your Money; and Clever Girl Finance: The Side Hustle Guide: Build a Successful Side Hustle and Increase Your Income.

Today, she lives with her husband and twins in New Jersey.

Writing a book is hard, and this one was particularly challenging because, unlike my three previous books, this is based on my personal story. Thank you to my parents for fact checking, sharing their own stories with me, and raising me to be who I am today, to my husband for encouraging me throughout this entire business building journey, to my twins who always tried to keep very quiet whenever Mommy was working on her book, and to my dearest and closest sisterfriends, who have never stopped supporting and cheering me on. From the texts and the phones calls encouraging me to keep going, to just always being there for me. I love and appreciate you.

To my advisors and big sisters, Maureen, Roshi, and Monique. Thank you, Maureen, for helping me lay out the initial outline for this book after I called you out of the blue to say I was stuck. Thank you, Roshi, for brainstorming book names with me over email, text message, and on the phone. And thank you, Monique, for reminding me about why I needed to write this book to share my voice. You have been with me on this journey, building Clever Girl Finance, and I appreciate you.

To my other amazing advisors, Dan, Jonathan, and Brent. Thank you for your advice, for constant words of encouragement, and for supporting this femaleowned and femalefocused business!

A massive thankyou to the Clever Girl Finance team for holding down the fort while I spent months focused on writing. Thank you, Esther, Yazmir, Anita, Stacy, Carli, and Kat. And thank you to all our incredible writers and content creators. You make Clever Girl Finance work.

To my development editor, Cassidy Horton, thank you for your feedback and motivation and for helping to make this a book I'm proud of.

To my managing editor, Kevin Harreld, for pushing me to write this book now, and to the rest of the incredible Wiley team that has supported me on my journey as a now fourtime authorthank you so much.

Be empowered and bold and know you have a voice that no one can make you bury.

As a child, I thought I would grow up to be a doctor. It was a big dream of mine. I would line up my dolls in my pretend doll hospital and treat them for madeup ailments. I was a great doll doctor. But in real life, the sight of blood made me queasy and I quickly realized that career path was a nogo for me. I wasn't sure what else I wanted to do until one day in high school in Nigeria, my dad brought a Compaq desktop computer home for our family. It was a massive thing with a standalone central processing unit that hummed and purred, but it was new and exciting. After spending hours and hours on the computer each weekend, I taught myself how to use MS DOS (Yup, it was the mid1990s!) from books my dad bought me. With my love for computers, I wound up deciding to study computer science and business with a certification in website development when I got to college. That decision was inspired by both my parents, who would always tell me, Bola, computers are the future, but if that doesn't work out, you can always fall back on business.

My dad was a PhDholding mathematician, econometrician, and later the head of the technology department at the government job where he worked. He was educated in Nigeria, Russia, and the United States. My mom, on the other hand, studied economics, had a master's degree in finance, and got her education in Nigeria, Austria, and the US. She worked in investment banking in Nigeria, building side hustles to earn extra income along the way.