Hi guys, I’m feeling some type of way for not being around as much and more importantly for not keeping you guys in the loop enough, I’ve only passively mentioned my relocation, I haven’t actually explained what my situation exactly is and for that I apologize.
Guys! It’s been a crazy couple of weeks! I’ve had to raise twice the money I initially budgeted and I’ve spent way more than I ever thought or imagined I would.
So I got admission into Southwales University in U.K for a Masters course in Cybersecurity early September, the next thing was to pay my school fees which I could conveniently afford if the Central Bank system in Nigeria was normal, scratch that, if Nigeria was a normal country. I’ll get to this shortly.
I first had issues with my Passport, because it was expiring by ending of February and I needed to leave the country before it did so I had to renew it even before it expired but the thing is, Nigeria is not a normal country, applying to renew passport is a hassle, it takes 3 months after applying to renew to be given a date for capturing.
Capturing is when they register your biometrics again, and then it takes additional 2 months for the passport to be ready except you pay extra to pull strings. This was going to be 5 months and I had to resume school in February. This was the beginning of my headaches.
Back to the school fees matter. My school fees costs around £12200, to confirm your admission, you have to pay 50% of your fees which I could afford using bank rate, so the process is usually like this, you apply for a form called FORM A through your local bank, to process foreign transactions from Naira to other foreign currencies using bank rate, because there is also black market rate which is almost double bank rate.
I applied to pay for the fees since early September, up until now, it’s still not sorted, the CBN claims that there is shortage of FX so the queue of people needing to do such transactions is long and it’s by first come first serve and can’t even serve everyone, but trust Nigeria, people pay extra to do anything, which I was told to and also did but guess what, I was scammed 😂, typical Nigeria.
I was left with only the option of going through the black market route even though I could hardly afford it, I’m talking about going all in, my life’s savings. But even if I could, I still had to sort out my Passport issues, because without Passport I can’t apply for VISA and without VISA I can’t go anywhere. So with Faith I continued pushing.
I was here at the immigration every other day like this, queuing from morning till evening waiting for my passport to no avail for weeks to months, until I finally got it few days ago since October after so many extra payments and back and forths.
At this point, I’m at the point of paying my fees, school resumes February 5, so I need to apply for priority VISA which is another extra cost to be able to make that date and believe me, I’ve had to liquidate 95% of my assets to achieve this goal and I’m still short of the total money I require, the only assets I’m yet to sell are the ones that take time to unstake.
I’ve had sleepless nights, I’ve been frustrated with questions like should I just stop and postpone this entire process? Maybe this maybe that, but then, I’ve already come so far, like so far, to be honest, I’m not exactly sure how I’m even going to survive when I get there Lmao! Laughing at my life!
It’s just sad to think that I have to go this far into my life’s savings but my consolation is that if my plan works out, it’ll be worth it in the end and I’ll be able to get back to stacking up in due time. I want to give myself a chance at a better life, how much is too much to achieve this goal? If you were me, would you stop now?
Moreover, the market has been bullish, a lot of my life’s problem will be solved if Hive moons as I’m already in power down mode, hurts but this is why we do what we do so that we can advance our life’s and help others we can where we are coming from. Certainly I’m not going to kill myself over the matter, I just want to play my part to the fullest and leave the rest to God.
Some friends are cheering me on while others are saying I should postpone this process, but like I said, I’m willing to try everything possible to make this work first, so yeah that’s why I’ve been absent here, I’ve just been all up in my head planning, scheming, calculating, planning and round and round. Hopefully all goes well.
One thing I must not fail to mention is that Hive enabled me to achieve all this and get this far, but this is a story for another day.
In the meantime I’ve been messing a lot with ChatGPT, it just seems like a toy to me, but a real one, I’ve been able to learn a lot from it in such little time, I’ve even tried building a website with it, one thing I’ll like to say is that the more you use it, the more you get familiar with the lingo that makes it bring out the crust of the answer that best suits your query. I love it. But I still need to know more of it.
So this is it guys, this is where I’m at. I hope I haven’t bored you out with my relocation shenanigans. I’ll definitely keep you all posted. Right now, I’m tapped out. Catch you all later. ❤️
Thanks for always reading.
