Every week, Zikoko seeks to understand how people move the Naira in and out of their lives. Some stories will be struggle-ish, others will be bougie. All the time, it’ll be revealing.
What’s your earliest memory of money?
I was in junior secondary school when I realised money could get me things I actually wanted. My parents didn’t give us money to school since we brought food with us. When I was JSS 2 or JSS 3, after a streak where I consistently came out first or second in class, my dad asked what I wanted as a reward. I told him I wanted a Mongoose bicycle. He bought it.
The bicycle cost ₦50k or ₦60k, which felt like such a huge amount of money to me. The experience made me realise that money was a thing that could give someone access to many other things.
What was the financial situation like at home growing up?
My dad was a petroleum engineer at an oil and gas company, and my mum ran our family business, supplying agricultural tools and industrial cleaning equipment to ports and factories. I’d say we were middle-class. We lived in an estate and were comfortable.
However, things weren’t always steady financially. In 2015, when I was in JSS 3, my dad was laid off from work during a corporate reshuffling. Right before that happened, my parents had lost money to an importer who scammed them on a supply deal.
It was a tough period. My dad became very quiet and kept to himself. The weekend shopping trips to the mall stopped, and we cut back on things like cornflakes and branded chocolates. Thankfully, we didn’t have to change schools, but it shook us up a bit.
Was this the first time you did something to earn money?
Somewhat. During the long holiday right after JSS 3, I was often at the family business, helping my mum out at her office.
One Saturday, a customer came in while my mum was away, and I managed to sell them some tools. When my mum returned, I handed over the money, and she gave me about ₦10k from the proceeds.
What did you do with the money?
I took my younger brother to a game house, we played PS4 games, and I spent the rest on sweets and snacks. I didn’t save a single kobo.
When did you start earning money consistently?
That was in uni. My first stint was in my first year in 2021. My lecturer assigned us Python and C++ projects, but many of my classmates struggled with them. I’d already learned programming languages from the STEM club in secondary school, so I had no issues.
I offered to help, charging ₦3k per student. It was a weekend assignment, and I did it for five classmates, making ₦15k total. That was just a one-off service, though. I didn’t need to make it a thing. I regularly got between ₦30k and ₦40k in pocket money each month and always got food and provisions from home. My allowance was mostly for miscellaneous expenses like assignment printouts.
Then, in 2023, during my second year, I started working remotely for a French agency. They handled research projects for master’s and PhD students. Whenever they got clients whose research work required data science projects or machine learning models, I would build them while my colleague handled the research writing.
How much did that pay?
Payment wasn’t fixed; it depended on the client’s budget and my negotiation. On average, I made between ₦30k and ₦100k per project. I worked there for a year and handled about five projects in that time.
In late 2024, during my final year, someone in a WhatsApp group chat posted an opening for a Junior AI Engineer at a US startup. I applied and got the role. The salary was ₦250k/month.
Juggling the job and final year was extremely stressful. I would be in lectures, and Slack notifications would pop up about pending tasks or a broken feature in a production environment. Thankfully, my project supervisor was understanding about my schedule, and my academic performance stayed solid.
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How long did you stay in that role?
Six months. I left in April 2025 after a Twitter contact introduced me to a healthcare startup that needed AI engineers. They offered better pay and flexibility structured around two-week sprints.
Depending on my performance per sprint, I earned between ₦300k and ₦600k per month. I left the job after three months because of office politics. The environment was taking a toll on me and making me doubt my potential. I didn’t even have a backup plan; I just quit to protect my mental health. I was done with uni at this point, but still sorting out my clearance.
What was your next move?
In August 2025, I got hired as an AI Engineer by an Indian company. The pay was pegged to Indian Rupees, converting to roughly ₦300k to ₦400k monthly.
However, this company also fumbled. There were talks of management mismanaging funds. We worked through the Christmas and New Year holidays, but salary payments stopped in December. I walked away in February 2026 when I got tired of the excuses and heard that some Indian employees had been waiting six months for their salaries. They still haven’t paid me.
Sigh. What have you been doing since February?
Freelancing. I get most of my clients from Twitter or
How has that been?
Honestly, it’s a struggle. With freelancing, there are days of joy and days when you get zero gigs and are just managing your life.
In a month, I can make between ₦200k and ₦300k. Sometimes, in a good month, it can stretch to around ₦350k. There are also months when I make zero naira.
How do you cope during the dry spells?
My mum is my safety net. I still live near my university campus, and my mum pays my annual rent of ₦250k and regularly sends me food. If I ever go broke or run into financial trouble, she steps in and helps me with cash.
For instance, I got into crypto futures trading early this year. I was considering different ways to make money, and everyone was talking about trading, so me too, I put my hand. I didn’t do any official training. I was just trading based on what I knew and learned online.
I had some wins, but instead of enjoying them, I greedily put the gains back into trading, trying to win more. Eventually, it’d go bust, and I’d lose money. At my worst, I lost between $300 and $500.
I was in that cycle for a few months before I eventually quit. The losses were becoming crazy, and the risk of wiping out your entire wallet on a margin call is too high. I don’t plan to trade again in this life. If I’m serious about money, I’d rather buy stocks and keep them. I’ve been researching the stock market and recently started investing, and it’s going much better.
At least if you make losses in the stock market, they’re just paper losses. You’ve not actually lost that money until you decide to sell the stocks. You can even decide to buy the dip and wait for the stocks to improve. But in trading, there’s nothing like paper loss. Once the loss starts happening, you either exit the trade. If you don’t get out in time, it’s going to hit your margin call. So whatever balance was in your trading wallet might also be wiped out due to the margin call.
Right. How would you describe your relationship with money?
I’m an impulse spender. If I want something and I have the money, I buy it. If it’s slightly above my budget, I’m the type of person who could take a loan to buy it because I know I have my mum’s support to cover my bills.
Though, as I said, I’m becoming more interested in stocks these days because I want to be intentional about growing the money I have. I started with the random ₦5k here and there in 2025, but after the crypto experience, I’ve become more serious with it. Now, I have about ₦500k in two Nigerian stocks and close to ₦1m in mutual funds.
I notice you didn’t mention savings
Yeah. I have nothing in savings. Once money enters my hand, I send about 50% to my mutual funds or stocks account and spend the rest. I don’t have much financial responsibility right now, so I don’t see a need to save. Maybe when I’m in my 30s and have a family, the pressure will increase, and my attitude to savings will change. But I’m still 23. Let me enjoy my 20s first.
What do your monthly running expenses look like currently?
After removing the 50% to investments:
What do the next few years look like for you? Is the plan to keep freelancing?
I hope to get back into 9-to-5, but there’s no strict timeline for now. If it comes, great. I’m just going with the flow right now.
Is there an ideal amount of money you think you should be earning right now?
If it’s a 9-to-5, an ideal monthly income would be between ₦500k and ₦1.5m.
What’s something you want right now but can’t afford?
To leave Nigeria. As an AI engineer, if I move to a developed country, I know my earning potential will skyrocket, and I won’t have to deal with police harassment. But the process is too expensive. Everyone should just get their PVC and vote for better governance.
How about the last thing you bought that made you happy?
An M4 MacBook Air I bought in December 2025. A vendor friend discounted it for me at ₦1.5 million, down from the retail price of ₦1.8 million to ₦2 million. I funded it entirely from my freelancing income.
How would you rate your financial happiness on a scale of 1-10?
5. I miss having a predictable fixed income. With a 9-to-5, you can plan your life around a fixed monthly income. Freelancing sometimes feels like living on borrowed time, because you can get a gig today and get nothing the next month. At least, I have my mum, and she rescues me sometimes.
Also, I feel like my stock investment is promising. I don’t have a fixed timeline, but my goal is to hit my first $10k. It’s possible. People have up to $100k and even more. Once I hit that first $10k, things will only get better.
If you’re interested in talking about your Naira Life story, this is a good place to start.
Find all the past Naira Life stories here.
