Watch out! There's a Grumpy Old Man about!
I blogged about this earlier, but at the request of a couple of emailers, here’s the second of 10 ‘clues’ you need to ‘get’ if you want to engage meaningfully with curmudgeons like me. [clue one is here]
Firstly, some background…
If you have been raised in a Western culture you have probably also been brought up with a ‘Protestant’ work ethic — meaning that you take it on your shoulders to carry the burden of generating enough income to support ourselves and loved ones once you retire.
But with the figure of $1million being banded about as the ‘minimum’ you need to enjoy a comfortable (and no more than that) retirement, how many of us can put hand on heart and say we have at least that stashed away.
I used to be a cat burglar. True. I’ve got a Swiss bank account with 40,000 cats in it. [boom tish]
We curmudgeons are very interested in all this money and investing stuff (yes, especially after you U.S. merchant bankers stuffed the world for the rest of us!), but we are risk-averse in case we drop a bundle right before we retire and have no means to recoup it.
We also, despite views to the contrary, haven’t completely lost ALL our marbles: we are still able to and interested in finding out more about the topics that interest us, like social media, history, adolescent taxidermy (that’ll fix those blimmin’ neighbourhood teenagers!), investing for dummies, and so on.
So, Tip Two: offer us continuing education on financial matters, and position your financial products as providing above-average market returns with lower-than-average risk.
