Retirement (or Last of the Summer Wine)

Hello Helen, Yes absolutely. As well as following the procedures. Form filling is awful for many folk. Ask the pensioners who try to fill in pension credit requests, leave alone sifting through who owns this & so on. It would be like me trying to hang wallpapers, or fix someone's tele!

Hello, ooow, hello. Business shim tactics. Business institutions, banks especially, use shim tactics, which is almost a wrapped up in tinsel deceit. Those with online banking will be familiar with emails in your inbox, "Our revised terms & conditions". Often, such will introduce a hidden deliberate error, which later they will correct, but over-correct so able to introduce a new condition which goes unnoticed until a crunch time comes along. There's nothing new in this. Even in my morning Genisis reading, Laban, deceives Jacob over a period of twenty years using the same tactics. There's not a lot we can do about it, because they counter evidence that would need forty barristers to argue over. Have a good day all.

Yes Philip. Banks can be rather confusing. Did you notice they all wear white coats ?

I think that here, most of them are wearing PJs because they're all working from home.

What exactly is this "online banking" thing? No scams with good old cash !!

Alas, if you don't use the internet you can't access the better accounts. So many services (more than banking) are very hard to access any other way.

Agreed. I still use cash wherever possible. The government would love to get rid of cash altogether. Why? Big Brother (I suppose these days I should say Big Sibling, but it don't have that ring). Every time you use a plastic card or an online transaction, there's a record on computer: your name, where you bought something, exactly what time to the second, who served you, what you bought, your bank account details, your address, how many moles (if any) you have on your left buttock... and so on ad nauseam. Now, cash. I can go up the Smoke on the train, buy something with cash, and nobody is any the wiser. Okay, there might be an image of a bloke in a shop on the CCTV. But I could be Jim smith, Micky Spillane, Aloysius Hancock, Oliver Thistlethwaite... maybe I should start wearing a hood, a baseball cap, or a woolly hat pulled down to obscure the face as much as possible. Any argument (or yet another government con) that scrapping cash would stop money laundering is a non-starter. Remember when they brought out the new plasticated mickey-mouse bank notes? "They will be [virtually] impossible to forge", we were told. Fake notes were in circulation almost as soon as the official ones were launched.

I know what you mean Slim, about keeping cash as it's important and I even understand the desire to use cash to be anonymous but that's a separate issue to online banking. As for travelling using cash rather than phone or card, the system probably flags people who use cash! Especially if they're covering their face. As for tracking people, it's fairly possible to do that now if they're looking for you but they're almost swamped with data. They don't routinely track everybody because it would be wasted effort. The data is out there but in a million different pits. Even your GP records aren't automatically connected to the NHS, and different hospitals don't necessarily have access to the records of each other. If you've ever had to see two different specialists, even for the same condition, they've often no idea what the other specialist knows. Businesses know most about people from what we search and buy but even that can be avoided. I use a browser with almost everything turned off. Google has most access to my movements but for some weird reason still thinks that I'm interested in cats and dogs and American football. It may know that I'm interested in Coventry but it doesn't seem to consider it a fact worth storing. It correctly identified that I'm interested in buying from small, medium and large outlets but that is a bit like concluding that I breathe and go to the toilet. So yes, if you ever commit a very serious crime the system might be able to track some people easier than others but...

Hello, Until 2015, I had always considered myself to be an optimist in most areas of UK society. That was the year where I had decided from my own life's work, that economic collapse was not only possible but probable, certainly in the UK. I pulled out of private share holding in 2015. That was a blessing as the following year, brexit came into reality, the stock market plunged & has only very slowly recovered, but it hasn't recovered in volume. That recovery is very thin. Worldwide indebtedness is sky high now. Governments borrowing money isn't new, it's necessary for forward investment, but what we have now, is borrowed money being paid back via a new credit card. I'm talking about government national borrowing. The never, never! Borrowing reaches a tipping point where it either implodes or topples. I know that it's gone past the point of no return. There are very accurate finance formula for establishing that as fact, not just gut feelings. Not that dissimilar to pyramid schemes that were all the rage forty years ago. Every major economic country/continent is currently in the same boat. China, USA, Europe, Australia India. World Bankruptcy, will possibly be the next major economic event. That's what's called an implosion which affects everyone. Savings wiped out in accordance with nationalisation, as the whole world economy is in effect nationalised. We all know what happened to pensions as businesses went bust. No different when governments to bust. What value will be the millionaires luxury yachts with their gold plated control panels. I've never been a gloom merchant in the past that I feel that I am now. I'm so grateful that I was born in the era like the majority of members here on our forum. The era that we have enjoyed, has had no match in the past & certainly not now. Our government have a list of cities in England, that are now described as spent, with no hope of recovery. Whole cities, not just districts. Coventry happily is not one of them on that list, but one of them is very close to us. Birds of a feather flock together. Have you noticed that even without controls of age access to our forum membership, we are nearly all of a similar age group. In the last six weeks, one of them today, two pub chains have ceased, closing their doors & lights off for the last time. I'm glad Coventry has Wetherspoons, not just for my grandson either. I hope that I haven't distorted any notion that I have shared in this dismal post. It's not based on news headlines or anything other than my own assessment. I could be wrong. At present, we do have our forum, a forum based on caring & sharing from members who care & share, who are the age group who have possibly the best valued memories of any.

I have been telling people for some time that myself and my contemporaries have been fortunate to live through possibly the best period in history. We have lived through the war but most of us too young to know the full horrors.

Back in '86 I became a "Sid" share owner after subscribing to Rolls Royce. I had more or less forgotten about the share certificates but had opted to re-invest dividends and coughed up when there was a rights issue. I recently received a dividend notification that caused me to check the value of my certificates and find I have a 2068% increase on my investment! Unfortunately, it's not in an ISA so I will have to pay CGT. Doesn't quite match my tax free gain of 5000% on housing from 1974. I think that inflation reducing our debts is one reason why us oldies feel so good about the past and so wary of the future. Brekkie must be on me next! Is Kenilworth Spoons accessible to all?

Hello Sir, Long term investments over time (providing there's no failures, or cluster of failures which is what rendered many endowment mortgages to fail a while back), tend to grow. If I hadn't pulled mine out in 2015, as of today's valuation, they would have shown an increase in value, but ten years ago I didn't know if I had another ten years. I did at the time maximise my ISAs, with the Coventry building society, with the proceeds, which as of today I'm still in front of if, I had left my stocks as they were in 2015. It's only money, hey!

I also feel our generation has lived through the best decades. The 60's and 70's may have been uncouth by today's standards, but they were a period of innovation and the foundations for many of today's structures, recycling, environment and long-term health. I feel I should also add the 50's, even though that decade was a fraction before my time, but it was still innovative and progressive. I recall a mentor when I was still an infuenciable teenager, once said: "They said the sixties swung, and the seventies swung faster. Where does that put the eighties and nineties of things keep accelerating" I think it comes to something when those who evaluate our younger years compared to their similar ages which they're currently living through.... Feel the same.

I think that it's natural to have periods in our life when things are going well, to tag them as a golden age. Having had good and bad periods in succession, I'd say that it would be impossible to define the best decades until you've looked back on all of them. My favourite era would be the early noughties when I had money, decent health and zero responsibilities. I had the internet and cable TV What's not to like? We face all sorts of crises at the moment, but the biggest problem is that we know about them. We know ALL about them. Every day the news fills us in. We are attracted to bad news. We're also spoiled by all the great stuff we see and do. We do things regularly that in the past would be very special treats. How hard is it to then get the same thrill? It's the same addiction that drives drug users to try the next drug. They want to feel the same startling pleasure they got the first time they tried their current drug. We are jaded by an immense back catalogue of outstanding works of artistic genius. Music, novels, films. The bar is now incredibly high. I'm not sure that if all the metrics were laid out, rather than just those that spring to mind, that I could pick a best. But then I'm a tech and information addict, so for me, the best era is always the next one.