Retirement
Happy New Year, Henry here, hoping everybody had a great Christmas, New Years and so on.
Retirement is supposed to be easy and stress free. Any large financial institution worth its salt advertises non-stop that if you invest with them, embrace their trading platform and follow their advice, then you can retire happily and worry free.
This is a lovely image, often followed up with gorgeous pictures of older people relaxing on some tropical island. It is lovely, but for many it is a pack of lies. As someone who is doing their own investing, it is clear to me that those huge financial institutions are not playing square with people, ordinary people like us.
The latest clipping I cut from the paper is datelined NY. It tells us what we all know by now that Charles Prince has been let go as the executive officer of Citygroup. Only a week before Stanley O’Neal was forced out at Merrill Lynch and Co.
You may well ask what has that to do with me. It has a lot to do with all of us, because these executives have had to announce several billion dollars in write downs over the past few weeks. Since they departed, a half a dozen other huge financial institutions have had to make similar announcements. Estimates differ but I have heard that the write downs will total to from one to two trillion dollars. That is a lot of cash in anybody’s book!
So what specifically does this have to do with you and I? What it has to do with us is that many of the funds, bonds and other financial instruments in which our retirement money is housed are compromised, and no body knows by how much. And with the incredible volatility in the stock market, apparently largely brought on by these same banks, nobody really knows how much your retirement funds have shrunk or where they will end up. Some people, thankfully not myself, those poor folks who lost millions in the collapse of Enron.
I guess the best one can say about you and your investments is: “May the Force be with you.”