Big money talks

How are you going? I hope there isn’t too much flooding in your neck of the woods. Stay safe during this shocker weather event.

I met with a financial planner via Zoom yesterday.

It was about as uplifting as watching the news.

There was all this gloomy talk about retirement and superannuation and why it’s important to save money and be sensible so you have lots of cash when you are old.

I wanted the financial planner to have a silver bullet for how I can have lots of cash NOW, while I’m still mobile and my health is fairly good.

DD suggested the financial planner to me. He saw him on TikTok and was entranced. DD gets lots of life tips from TikTok these days, everything from holiday destinations to how to make bagels.

The financial planner confessed that he thought doing TikTok videos was a bit daft until they started clocking up 70,000 views and people with grey hair like DD started making appointments with him.

He had mistakenly thought it was filled with dancing teenagers. Then his mortgage offset account how-to video went viral and a nerdy star was born.

I will have to find another financial planner though – not because the TikTok one depressed me, but because it’s not appropriate for him to advise both DD and me. I forget why. Probably some sort of ethical concern since we aren’t married and have separate finances.

I said I should probably get a full-time job before going down the planning path as I don’t have any savings to sort out and I only just started getting superannuation again after being “retrenched” (those inverted commas are there for ironic emphasis) in 2020.

So I have quite a bit of lost ground to regain.

The financial planner suggested that if I refinance my house when I get a full-time job I could put a lump sum into superannuation. I would rather put a lump sum into a new car and bathroom.

I am so frivolous.

I have never been that big on worrying about how much money I will have when I retire. Anything could happen between now and then.

I’m a fairly sensible rather than a very sensible person.

Actually, I would suffer my Trainspotting-style bathroom for a few more years if I could go on a beach crawl to the Top 10 beaches in the South Pacific for 2022. This is Turquoise Bay in Western Australia, which came in at No.1 …