I’m Back

I have just renewed the hosting of the website for another 3 years, so we’ll see how it goes. As I write this, it is mid October 2022. What a roller coaster the last 3 years have been. From an amazing 2 month stay in Athens September/October 2019, through another great 6 weeks in New Zealand Dec 2019/Jan 2020 staying with my son, his wife and my lovely new grandson. Arriving back at the end of January 2020 to the onset of Covid, and all the madness that then ensued, anyone could be forgiven for wanting to reset the clock.

But resetting the clock would not be good. We have not yet learned everything that we need to, from the past 3 years. My world may be skewed, but from where I see it, on what I like to think is ‘the middle ground’, we have come out of Covid, an even more polarised society.

• Lockdowns were essential v Lockdowns did nothing
• Our doctors are amazing v I can’t get to see any doctors
• Vaccines are amazing v vaccines are poison
• Masks worked v Masks were dreadful
• The poor have got poorer (and in worse health), the rich have got richer

No matter who you speak to, we seem to have lost the ability to take a balanced view. Our core belief that governments ultimately had our best interests at heart has certainly taken a beating. Here in the UK, we are a very long way from working out what went wrong, unravelling the huge amount of corruption, from £billion costs for unsatisfactory PPE, to all sorts of people in the government and their friends ‘feathering their nests’, the revelations of ‘partygate’ while the rest of us hunkered down, obeying the rules to the letter. We have seen everything from great good being performed by some very lovely people, to a huge amount of fraud. Until we take an honest look at ‘What we did’, how we ‘followed the Science, or indeed, the lack of it’. What could we have done better, and did any of it do any good. The countries with least intervention seem to have done just as well as the one with lots of controls.

We have to learn from this experience, use it to move on, and build a better world for all of us.

Today as I write this, here in the UK, I am struggling to make sense of how our government has treated us as a country, and indeed continues to treat us. We have lost a Queen who had massive amount of experience and now we have a new King. We have a brand new Prime Minister who seems to be enjoying her opportunity to cause chaos. Overnight our interest rates are rising, the value of the £ against the $ reached a 50 year low. We have an increasing threat of escalation of the Russia / Ukraine war. Inflation is rising across much of the world. What could go wrong?!

Inflation is ‘the elephant in the room’ for any retiree. When my husband and I started on this journey 11 years ago now, inflation was very low. Today it is around 10%, and I suspect it will go higher yet. Speaking to some people who know far more than me, the general consensus is that we’ll have a couple of years of high inflation, then it will drop down back to 2-3% by 2025. However a couple of years at 10-15% will hurt our bottom line. Our private pensions can increase at a maximum level of 5% p.a. You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to work out that there won’t be as much spare cash around!

So I can feel a cool wind starting to blow… I hope we have done enough preparation to protect our lifestyle throughout the next 20 years. We don’t use all our income, we have short term savings and long term investments. We have recently invested in Solar Panels for our house, to shelter us from the trebling of electricity prices. (Though the environmental cost of producing the said panels is quite substantial, so definitely not totally Green Energy!)