Thoughts of a carer

  July 2022  I’ve been helping out my sister and my mother recently; like many in their early sixties, I’ve also been looking at my finances, and trying to work out what I might need in the future.  My mum’s situation has given me food for thought - serious thought. After nearly thirty years of retirement she found herself in hospital at the tender age of 89, and the doctors declared her medically fit for discharge - which sounds fine, but she’s really struggling with her mobility. The hospital and social services between them agreed her discharge was ok; social services proposed she should be at home, with four care visits a day to help with meals and dressing. That, basically, is what our health and social care system might provide for you when you’re old and unable to look after yourself.  With the experience I’ve had with Viv, I was horrified - as was my sister. My mum has lived alone for the last twenty five years in a tiny, one bedroom bungalow (that was once p...

  June 2022 I went to Elstree a couple of weeks ago: right outside the station there was a poster: *** In my youth I banked with Barclays; in 1988 they closed a savings account of mine - which held a modest sum, perhaps £10 - without telling me, because I had not used it for a long time.  I wasn't happy with this, so moved my account to Midland Bank and was with them, and HSBC, for a further thirty years or so, before going back to Barclays. The reason for leaving HSBC at that time is more complex than that for leaving Barclays in the 80s. I shall explain. *** It was a coincidence, but in 1988 I also met my future wife. From the outset I realised she had some problems with financial management, but the ‘optimism bias’ in me kicked in and we married in 1990. Within months we started to have financial ‘hiccups’ - there would be less money to last out the month than I had expected, I would have to raid the savings account for some ‘one-off’ bill or expense. I found myself unable ...

  My stepmother passed away last summer; my father had died some fifteen years before. They were both a good age, he made it to 81, she to 89. They’d had a good retirement in their bungalow together, travelling around Europe quite widely, enjoying a good standard of living funded by their pensions which, including their state pensions, were perhaps providing them with combined income of around £40K. I didn’t know details of their income, or outgoings, when they were alive. People don’t talk about money; many, I believe, don’t even think about it in quite the way they should. *** Viv and I have a number of spreadsheets which document our possible finances in a number of differing scenarios. We know what our pension can pay for now; we also, perhaps, are lucky that we don’t have to buy annuities to use them, and can plan to have the amounts of money that we might need at a time in our lives that we might need it. One of the scenarios we’ve considered is that I die in my seventies, le...