think some of the most important financial lessons from the year 2020 are in the following areas.

Did anybody think of establishing an emergency fund for a global pandemic? Really, most people thought of having extra funds available for a recession, maybe depression or moments of unemployment, not through the lens of a global pandemic! Let’s reset and re-frame our thinking: we need a global, catastrophic, generational change fund, if not, our once-in-a-100-years-human-disaster-survival-fund.

But what does that mean financially? It means that you can no longer retain your emergency fund in some bank paying one percent interest just because you want easy access to your money. Your emergency funds cannot be retained in any account earning less than or equal to the annual rate of inflation. Currently, according to the United States Labor Department data, the annual rate of inflation for 2020 stands at 1.4 percent. Therefore, unless your emergency fund is invested where the rate of return is greater than the rate of inflation, you’re administering self-inflicted financial wounds. Emergency funds may be placed into treasury indexed protected securities; these include money market mutual funds, CD accounts, high yielding savings accounts, and money market accounts. You and I will now need to redefine and re-imagine our emergency fund construct.

One of the main lessons from 2020 was an opportunity to teach your children and young adults to differentiate between their needs from their wants. Parents, mentors, aunts and uncles, and other leaders found plenty of teachable moments to educate children and young people the purposes of budgeting, saving, charitable giving, and volunteerism. There should also have been financial lessons taught in entrepreneurship, investing and business. The financial lessons in 2020 should not have been for adults only, but your entire village and community. How much more will your family be empowered in 2021 based upon their 2020 experiences?

If your business managed to survive last year, 2020 probably brought clarity to you as an entrepreneur, especially as you examined your supply-side ecosystem. You should have analyzed things like whether or not your business is dependent on a few customers or many. Either way, you need to do something about that supply chain because it invariably sets up the next question and that is: will your customers pay their bills on time?

This crucial question will force you into other realities such as do you have a banking relationship with your banker? The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was a federal government loan package designed to provide direct incentives to small businesses, and to keep their workers on the payroll. The only problem with the PPP was that one needed to have a solid, banking relationship with his or her banker to access those funds. Many small and medium minority businesses did not have those relationships and therefore failed because they had no access to resources.

While having a solid business banking relationship with your banker is important, I personally remembered the importance of having more than one banking relationship. I do business with several bankers and therefore have flexibility when I need to in leveraging opportunities and options. Further, the banking relationship should provide lines of credit for your business when needed. Finally, perhaps as critical as banking and funding relationships are those with accountants and lawyers. The year 2020 should have exposed the fact that these professionals are part of the DNA of the current economic system and without them the system would fail.

The above simply reflects a limited sample of financial lessons from the year 2020. Regardless of the administration and politics in place for 2021, you’ll never be financially baptized and born again, unless you’re going to implement the lessons learned from 2020.