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Richard is the owner over at Money Trainers – telling the truth about money. He’s
in chief over here at the Financezone.co.uk and is currently working on the money/people/planet is close to fucked conundrum. Aged principles and modern money.
Money and Time
These are the two things that cause us humans most problems. There never seems to be enough money kicking around and time, well that just seems to disappear into the the ether.
Yet we seem to deny the truth about time and money, we are quite happy to trade our time in order to obtain money but very few of us it seems want to learn how to make money work for us and therefore to help us save time.
And then when we get the money, we tend to use it to purchase stuff. to consume, because this is the way of the world. If you want it’s the ultimate capitalism. We work hard, we earn money, we spend money, and that money once spent is never returned to us. It has been exchanged it is lost forever. every pound you spend, ends up in somebody else’s pocket, rewarding them. And not you.
This money has arrived with us because we have traded time. This time will never ever come back to us again, once time has been spent it never ever returns to us, sure we are able to manage our time in order to make work more effective for us but we can never make any more and we never know how much more we have left.
Time is not seen as a precious resource until it is too late and we are close to death, a bit like not being able to draw down on your pensions until you are ¾’s dead.
This is what modern humans do, work, borrow from their futures, spend hard earned on stuff that they can’t or won’t use and that stuff is ruining the one and only ultimate safe space they have.
It seems that only modern humans suffer this fate.
Animals – not having the minds that allow them to contemplate themselves don’t worry about time – they just go round eating. Mating, running jumping. Until death. Little if any higher level thought it would seem.
Aborigines – when first discovered by foreign invaders (the British) were mocked because they had leisure time, time to paint in caves and to tell stories. Of course they understood about preserving resources – not hunting all of the wild life or taking all of the crops. They had learned this behaviour over the 65,000 years they’d live there. In 1788 when the British arrived they thought the locals were backward.
Modern Humans – Crowd ourselves on trains in order to get to work, spend our money on stuff we don’t need after we’ve traded our lives for it and have only just started to notice that the wholesale consumption of stuff is not doing much for our only planet. In the main, tend to have debt (a mortgaged future) are stressed up to the eyeballs and are surrounded by things that don’t make them happy, at least on the side of their lives they show. Reality check – go watch the news for five minutes or look around the office.
I’ve looked at much of this over the last ten years or so and have arrived at a couple of conclusions.
We are all fucked if we carry on as we are.
If you don’t learn how to make your money work for you now, you are fucked.
If you don’t have a business/side business you will be fucked, slowly.
If you think someone (political party/new employer/magic button to press) is about to come and save you – you are completely fucked, now.
Sure, you may go on to have a reasonable life – but look at where we are. Record energy prices, record population (the majority of which are old and are now taking out the system and not adding anything to it. Record property prices, record reduction in state benefits like pensions – despite record levels of taxation. The uber rich are cleaning up at the expense of the planet and many are are just working toward a minimum wage hell. You can’t even get a degree level education unless you commit to £60k of debt before you even get a job.
Before you all start trolling me. I’m not leftie, just a practical optimist – AKA a realist. You know when the system is fucked when directors award themselves a pay rise and divi just before the liquidators arrive – think Carillion – and then the Government of the day sits on it’s hands. Or when art prices are up by a squillion per cent and at the same city centre flats are never lived in.
Solutions To The Problem
Own your time and your skills. That means your own business at least in part as a side hustle. Your own business, structured correctly is a Money Machine . You can own one or Invest in one -shares for the time being.
With digital you can sell from your phone – a side hustle is easier than ever.
Only invest in another business (shares) if they provide an income, same goes for any investment. If it provides income back to you, that’s money that you don’t have to work for.
Home ownership as a goal. The Germans don’t as a rule, nothing wrong with the German economy. Lobby your MP as hard as you like to make sure more houses are built, meanwhile get savvy with your money and rent. Let someone else tie up their cash property. Provided you take action on the above it won’t be long
Remember we trade our time for money, this money is then tied up an asset that produces no income (a house) it’s an expense to keep and maintain it. An asset must be like the business money machine – it should work in the background and produce an income for you without it being worked on or with – just the odd dusting down now and again.
Don’t Buy Into Pensions.
The tax benefits of pensions are a myth. Any tax relief on your contributions goes in charges, and any benefit when you are a lot closer to death is in the main taxable. Pensions are deferred income with charges deducted that you have little control over.
Pensions – are often recommended as the way to secure a future. At current retirement ages you’ll need to around seventy percent dead before you can draw on the (average life expectancy is 79 for men and you can draw on pensions from age 55).
This means you need to invest in pensions for a long while, in the hope that they will work for you, produce the capital appreciation you’ll need between now and the. Of course the providers and advisers love pensions – they get to keep control of the money for thirty years or more and get to deduct charges over the period of time – no wonder you’ll not hear about any of the alternatives to pensions.
Importantly the lobbying carried out by financial services firms means you are left with more pensions and not less – recently auto enrolment – enforced pension savings and pension freedoms have been a massive gift to the industry.
Pensions are inflexible – you can’t get access to the funds until you get to an official date; and this date has been increasing in recent years.
Pensions – do nothing for you between now and when you are close to being dead. They can’t produce an income you can use now, are limited in the choice of investments and add a layer of complexity to your planning.
Pensions – have notoriously high charges and adviser fees attached and there is no guarantee of any investment return, nor can you complain and expect compensation when the don’t deliver.
When you are ready for more, come over to www.moneytrainers.co.uk or www.thefinancezone.co.uk and start to get a proper education on this money and time stuff.
Swearily yours.
Richard