My very own bid for immortality as a model Selfless Spender

It amuses me to reflect that neighbours and casual acquaintances once used to sidle up to me and shyly request my financial advice.

I was always swift to put them right. “You need a financial adviser,” I’d say.

“I thought that’s what you were,” they’d reply.

“No, I’m a financial PR adviser.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A financial adviser tells you how to lose all your own money. A financial PR adviser helps public companies to explain how they have lost all the shareholders’ money.”

I’d then add something along the lines of: “I shouldn’t be doing this but, since it’s you, if you’re thinking of taking out an endowment mortgage or a payment protection policy, I wouldn’t bother.”

It doesn’t look like any of them listened. Presumably there is one person somewhere in the UK for whom PPI was an appropriate purchase, but the billions set aside for compensation suggest that he or she is proving exceedingly hard to find.

I will state for the record that I never had any PPI myself, in the hope that this column may be read by at least one of the claims management companies that pester me on the subject every day.

But that was one of the few personal financial matters on which I ever made the right call. A fact of which I have been brutally reminded by spending the entire morning in my attic, frantically searching through papers to find the documentation on a transaction of more than a decade ago, which suddenly looks like unravelling rather expensively.

At times like these, hoarders like me feel a modest glow of satisfaction at having religiously kept every bank statement since the first, from Barclays in Clayton Street West, in 1972.

The depressing thing was realising that at the turn of the millennium I was, if not stinking rich, more than comfortably off. I might not have had the bank balance of a lottery winner, but could have been mistaken for someone who had copped the prize for five balls plus the bonus in a draw that threw up some pretty unpopular numbers. 

And now it’s all gone. I am truly, absolutely skint. Which has led me to reflect on how on earth I allowed it to happen.

I have paid off a small mortgage, bought an old blacksmith’s forge and a modest patch of land, and paid for one wedding and a honeymoon, but no funerals. That might account for half of it, I suppose, but what about the rest?

I don’t take expensive foreign holidays, or British ones if I can avoid it. I dress like a reasonably fragrant tramp. My kids were born on the NHS. The only past extravagances I can readily identify are a penchant for buying books and opera tickets – the former now abandoned because I have run out of shelf space, and the latter severely curtailed by the difficulty and expense of arranging childcare.

Still, the numbers speak for themselves. Without really trying, I have clearly become one of those few heroic spenders who are helping to keep what is left of the British economy afloat. In marked contrast to those fish-faced enemies of the people who insist on sticking their mites into savings account, deaf to strong hints from on high like the absence of any interest payments.

If this were Soviet Russia, I expect I would qualify for some sort of “hero of the people” badge to wear proudly on my lapel. As it is, I shall settle for a MBE in the next Honours List, for services to national prosperity. George Osborne please note.

Though if the Chancellor really wants to stimulate the economy through some targeted investment in arts and culture, I would be willing to pose for a new statue of “The Selfless Spender” to be erected in some suitable central Newcastle location.

I envision myself laughing as the wind catches my open wallet and notes cascade out. Given an industrial fan and some real banknotes, this could create a bit of local economic stimulus all of its own. He could call it “Quantitative Easing Mark 2".

Remember that you read it here first when the Budget comes out.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Remember that it will all be the same in a hundred years' time

As Europe teeters on the brink of an almost unimaginable economic catastrophe, one that may make the events of the 1930s seem like a perfect summer of cream teas and croquet on the vicarage lawn, my thoughts keep returning to a valuable saying of my mother’s: “It will all be the same in a hundred years’ time.”

Bearing this in mind, one of the many things I cannot get worked up about is pensions. Partly, I will admit, because my personal late breeding programme makes it highly unlikely that I will ever be able to retire. Though the other thing making retirement totally inconceivable is the dreadful performance of the investments that I was persuaded to make over the years in a pension fund.

I remember that this concept was sold to me with various projections based on differing growth rates. But I do not remember ever seeing these include the reality of no growth at all, or at any rate growth so low that it barely covers the fat fees of the towering geniuses managing my fund.

My pension fund: how it was meant to be

The image "My pension fund: how it turned out" has been removed to avoid potential charges (financial, not criminal) from the money-grubbing image copyright police. But imagine the one above with the arrow pointing the other way and you will be pretty much there.

I was financially sophisticated enough to see through the great endowment mortgage scan, even though I was called a fool for insisting on a dull old repayment mortgage when I could have this fantastic product that would not only pay off my debt at the end of its term, but leave me rich as Croesus, relaxing in a hot tub in the Caribbean with a minimum of three bikini-clad babes. It was like choosing a penny farthing when I could have had a top-of-the-range Rolls Royce.

I was even bright enough always to tick the “no thanks” box when persuasively offered Payment Protection Insurance, though this does not stop me receiving repeated automated phone calls from helplines eager to pursue my mis-selling claim.

But a pension I fell for, hook line and sinker. Tax relief on the money going in, and a tax-free environment in which my money would surely grow. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for a start Gordon Brown (peace be upon him for saving the nation from the euro) came along came along and concluded that we were all having it too good, so reduced those tax breaks. Then piles of onerous and expensive regulations were heaped upon funds to prevent another Robert Maxwell craftily using them to line his own pockets. And to cap it all, the stock market went to hell in a handcart.

Not to worry, though, because my pension fund managers kept coming up with brilliant new wheezes for putting money into bright, shiny new things that offered so much more potential than dull old shares. For all I know, they could have included packages of mortgages on trailer parks in Detroit, dressed up as Triple A bonds. Because I made the critical mistake of getting so bored with the whole thing that I broke my lifelong golden rule of never investing in things I did not understand (which basically restricted me to a portfolio of pubs, breweries, hotels, restaurants and bakers) and saying the grown-up equivalent of “Whatever”.

So now I find myself with untouchable pension savings that were originally supposed to fund a comfortable if not luxurious retirement just two years hence, and would now buy me an annuity best described as pitiful.

Do I feel sympathy with those public sector workers who are going on strike tomorrow because their contributions are going up and their prospective pensions coming down? Of course I do. But I also feel that, to coin a phrase, “we are all in this together” in the face of inconveniently rising life expectancy and lousy investment returns. And the one thing I don’t feel inclined to do, as I contemplate the ruin of my own hopes of retirement, is to pay a penny more in tax to support their hopes of putting their feet up at my expense.

Working until we all drop sadly seems the only answer. Just like it was a hundred years ago before people started living long enough to make the whole idea of a pension industry worth dreaming up in the first place.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.