Geisha Kow­lessar-Alon­zo

Amid ris­ing house­hold debt and more peo­ple seem­ing­ly turn­ing to non-tra­di­tion­al ways of sav­ing mon­ey, Cen­tral Bank Gov­er­nor Dr Alvin Hi­laire is ad­vis­ing cit­i­zens to think care­ful­ly be­fore putting their mon­ey in­to fi­nan­cial schemes which promise quick turnovers.

Hi­laire’s warn­ing came even as the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice con­tin­ued their probes in­to the raid on the Drug Sou Sou head­quar­ters in La Hor­quet­ta last week. Po­lice had re­port­ed­ly seized some $22 mil­lion in a raid on the op­er­a­tions but ju­nior of­fi­cers at the La Hor­quet­ta Po­lice Sta­tion re­port­ed­ly gave the mon­ey back to DSS CEO Keron Clarke with­out the au­thor­i­ty to do so.

Speak­ing af­ter he de­liv­ered the cur­rent Fi­nan­cial Sta­bil­i­ty Re­port yes­ter­day, Hi­laire said the Cen­tral Bank was un­aware that so many peo­ple were in­volved in sou-sou arrange­ments and what he de­scribed as “po­ten­tial­ly dif­fi­cult schemes.”

“The first thing you should ask is, can I af­ford to lose this mon­ey,” Hi­laire ad­vised, adding that some peo­ple be­lieve they are in­vest­ing in some­thing which gives them a very high re­turn in a short space of time.

“You have to look at what your sit­u­a­tion is. You have to be aware that if it’s a high­ly prof­itable in­vest­ment, then it’s high­ly risky.

“If it means that next week your chil­dren would not have pam­pers, think again.”

Hi­laire said peo­ple should al­so ask them­selves how non-tra­di­tion­al fi­nan­cial or­gan­i­sa­tions are mak­ing their mon­ey.

“Ex­act­ly what are they do­ing to come up with that?

“I think that is rel­e­vant be­cause you look at your own cir­cum­stances and you say, ‘Well, for me to make this $5,000, how many maxi trips I had to make to scrape to­geth­er this mon­ey? How many stores did I have to paint or clean to make this mon­ey?’ Or, ‘How much over­time did I have to clock in to make this mon­ey,’” Hi­laire not­ed

Third­ly, he sug­gest­ed peo­ple should al­so ask them­selves if they have any re­course if some­thing goes wrong.

“If some­thing goes wrong can I go to the Cen­tral Bank or to the Se­cu­ri­ties and Ex­change Com­mis­sion­er, or to the Fi­nan­cial Ser­vices Om­buds­man, which you can do with reg­is­tered com­pa­nies,” Hi­laire said.

In this vein, he said the Cen­tral Bank plans to in­crease its ed­u­ca­tion­al aware­ness cam­paigns.

“It does mean that we have to up our game in the area of fi­nan­cial ed­u­ca­tion and I will have to talk to our om­buds­man about that,” he added.