WorthBuilding

Photo by Random Institute on Unsplash There is a particular feeling that financial technology has gotten very good at selling. You are standing at a checkout, online or in a shop, and you want something you cannot quite afford this week. A screen offers you a way out. Split it into four payments. Pay nothing today. The thing is yours now, and the cost arrives later, in pieces small enough to ignore. For a moment the gap between what you have and what you want simply disappears. That feeling is the product. Not the loan, not the item. The feeling that the gap is gone. It is the same feeling whether the screen says Klarna or Afterpay at an American checkout, or whether it is a menu on a basic phone in Kigali offering you a loan in under a minute. The technology is different. The currencies are different. The marketing is dressed up in different languages. But underneath, the offer is identical, and so is the trap waiting on the other side of it. Our generation, more than any before ...

Photo by Jean Claude Akarikumutima on Unsplash There's a plot of land near me in Kigali, a little under 500 square meters. In 2006 it was worth around 3.5 million Rwandan francs. By 2025 it was valued somewhere between 50 and 65 million. That's not a typo. The land got about fifteen times more expensive in under twenty years, and nobody I know earns fifteen times what their parents earned. I'm in my twenties. I look at the people younger than me, the ones still in school, and one question stays stuck in my head: will any of them ever own a home? Not a mansion. A home. Four walls that belong to them instead of a landlord. For a long time the honest answer felt like no. Then I started seeing a different kind of story online. People a bit over my age, some under, some exactly my age, in markets just as broken as the one I'm watching, actually buying houses. Set aside the trust-fund kids, the inheritances, the lucky breaks, all of which are hard to come by now anyway. ...