One thing that never seems to be in short supply during any crisis or when you want to get something done, is advice. First, is a link to an article about George Soros who says http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml? the current oil price is a bubble but mentions later that the current financial situation is far worse than the first oil price shock in 1973 when the oil price more than tripled and the FT – 30 Index (the FT-SE 100 was only invented in the next decade) lost three quarters of its value over 18 months. This was not long after I started my (first) career in banking and working on a stock and share desk was a very valuable experience. After that, it did not take many brain cells to see the 1987 one coming or to see that the dot.com boom would end in tears. There will be another boom probably within 10 years but don’t ask me when. If all this is too serious, cartoonist Matt manages to hit the nail on the head www.telegraph.co.uk/news/matt/2021895/Matt-cartoon.html

Recent training involved writing a report for a lady who had a reasonable job and standard of living but part of my work was to recommend some sort of Long-term Care protection within her disposable income. There is only one provider now of pre-funded long-term care plans where you take out the policy while you are healthy and benefit is paid according to physical or mental disability. Rates are much higher than a few years ago when there were five or more players in this market. All the other players baled out for two reasons: firstly, reinsurance costs went up 200 per cent, secondly, people applied so late in the day that it was a case of when rather than if there would be claim, which made it a loss-leader for the insurance companies concerned. Silly figures pop up again on this awful subject as the so-called Protection Gap – the amount people are not saving to cover the cost of care in old age is £2.6 trillion.

Silly figures pop up again this week on this awful subject, as the so-called Protection Gap – the amount people are not saving to cover the cost of care in old age is £2.6 Trillion.

Life goes on, and my Inbox gets the best-written Inheritance scam e-mail yet, but is let down by the Barrister David spelling his family name Emmanuel in one part of the e-mail and Emmanual in another part. Just the sort of guy who would share his client’s inheritance of £7.5 million with you. Of the two e-mail domains quoted, one is the perfectly respectable btinternet.com and the other appears to be from Norway – can’t see the word Nigeria anywhere.

Thanks to the Guardian for a monster legal case involving Scottish Widows http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/may/26/pensions.insurance where pension investments were switched out of products which gave a guaranteed rate of 7 per cent a year and which was done near the height of the above-mentioned dot.com boom.

My site statistics always fascinate me and according to my plug-in, it is Good Morning Vietnam! As usual, the USA leads the way with 11,117 pages this month followed by 1,506 from Vietnam and a measly 566 from Great Britain in 7th place. The only Vietnam connection that comes to mind is via my daughter who had a wonderful time there a few years ago when she effectively self-financed her 2 and half year grand tour around the world by teaching English, but I don’t think she left her e-mail there or mine. One of the most memorable events is their Teachers’ Day holiday in November. If you are a teacher there, this is a day when you are treated like a queen for a day as the status of teachers in Asia is much different to Europe. Whoever my readers are in Vietnam, welcome aboard.

Another visitor asks, “my endowment insurance has been paid up how long should you have to wait for the insurance company to pay out?” Answer, on the maturity date but they might pay it out now if you ask them – check for penalties here.

Prize for the most unusual phrase to end up on my site must go to: worst time for root canal treatment full moon -Words fail me.

My monthly pension surgeries throw up an interesting situation. One member of staff is 65 next month and wants to continue working. He and HR department are under the impression that he would have to leave service and return on a casual basis after taking his pension benefits. This situation which used to exist with Occupational Pensions disappeared two years ago. Taking pension benefits and continuing employment are unrelated.

There will be work for the guy to do but the staff benefit polices do not cover anyone after the age of 65. Employees are entitled to Death-in-Service benefit for example, whereby if they die while working for their employer, their beneficiaries will receive a lump-sum of a multiple of their basic salary. After his 65th birthday, it appears that this employee will not have this benefit (or the other ones) and quite a few employees want to work after this age. There seems to be an age discrimination issue here and I suggest that the employer checks this out ASAP with their employment lawyers. The answer should be interesting.

Another view on pensions is given by pensions guru Stewart Ritchie, Director of Pensions Development at AEGON Scottish Equitable. Financial Advisers are going to be busy with PADA Personal Accounts Delivery Authority http://www.padeliveryauthority.org.uk/ being given a new increased budget of £20 million – most of which has been used on external consultants. Personal Accounts are the government’s version of compulsory pensions due for introduction in 2012 but the tremors will be felt before then. The burden of this is unsurprisingly dumped on employers with fines of up to £50,000 or even up to 2 years imprisonment for non-compliance.

As usual a couple of facts stick in one’s mind: half of the people under the age of 34 who are not saving expect to have the same income in retirement, self-invested personal pensions (SIPPS) are increasing steadily and LEVEL annuity rates are the highest for over 5 years and are 10 per cent higher than 2 years ago.

The constant stream of changes is nullifying the positive side of pension simplification introduced two years ago. For a government strapped for cash, there is complete myopia where the increased cost of pensions and regulation dumped on employers will inevitably lead to a reduction in profits and the taxes these would generate, not to mention those who will not be employed at all as each job gets more expensive. Last but not least, there is the usual deafening silence on the £1 Trillion public sector pensions bill. Two million people in the last 10 years have decided enough! and emigrated http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1990807/Two-million-Britons-emigrate-in-10-years.html

As a change or perhaps a reward for my media efforts last Friday, it is a double birthday at the very trendy Strawberry Moons bar in Heddon Street, just off London’s Regent Street http://www.strawberrymoonsbar.co.uk/events/calendar/ Noise levels make conversation practically impossible but the huge number of beautiful ladies there somehow make me forget this and after watching a Rod Stewart impersonator who comes on at 10.30 pm, we pick up our stuff for Glyndebourne the following day and take our leave.

Weather reports are not encouraging but an absence from the opera for more years than I care to remember, heighten the anticipation. Set in the South Downs 54 miles south of London, Glyndebourne is away from any large towns and we get a parking space without any bother 30 minutes beforehand. People are carrying picnic hampers into the main building and are being set up in the galleries behind the seating circles.

Eugene Onegin is one of only two operas by Tchaikovsky being much better known than his other one, The Queen of Spades. Writing it nearly gave him a nervous breakdown and is based on a poem by Pushkin. Love, jealousy and especially unattainable love are the themes here and this production is a revival of an earlier one from the 1990s. It is sung in Russian but with a translation screen above the stage. Our chance to get tickets arises from a previous dress rehearsal where the conductor insisted on an extra one as one of the leading ladies didn’t know her lines….

An announcement at the start of the performance reminds us of a couple of last minute changes through illness, that this is a rehearsal and therefore some artists might prefer not to sing their lines. But the production is complete, flawless and very enjoyable. Act I second scene in Tatyana’s bedroom when she is talking about marriage to her nanny brings a lump to my throat thinking of my daughter’s wedding later this year. But my favourite scene is Lensky’s lament just before his duel with Onegin. Many others agree here as the applause he receives at the end surpasses that for the singers playing Onegin and Tatyana.

Such is the reputation of Glyndebourne that productions are usually sold out in advance making it the only financially self-sufficient opera in the UK. At the time of writing, two tickets for Eugene Onegin are available on eBay at cost £175 each, but the route for many people who want to get tickets is to join the Returns Club http://www.glyndebourne.com/tickets/returns_club/

Total performance time is 4 and half hours with a 20 minute and 85 minute interval. The latter is when the picnic hampers are fully opened and our host is able get out of his costume and pop over to visit our own picnic in the car park, for a few minutes. Cold champagne, a lovely prawn salad, the sound of baby lambs calling for their mothers in the next field and the rolling green hills make the drizzle and occasional light rain irrelevant. As a result, there is an absence of the bunfights for the best picnic spots on the lawn when the stiff upper lips of the British melt in the heat and where occasionally, emotions surpass that of the opera being performed.

Other productions this year include Bizet’s Carmen and Hansel & Gretel by Englebert Humperdinck – not the crooner Arnold George Dorsey from the 1960s by the way. These will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/

Working from home on Wednesday and the phone rings – it is the BBC. Do I advise on mortgages and investments? Yes. They are doing a feature on the merits of renting versus buying and would I like to help? Two other professionals will be involved including an estate agent. They have a lady who has sold her property and wants to know if she should buy or rent. What are the pros and cons? It depends…

Starting at the beginning, to get a mortgage you need a deposit and a job in that order. Is it a good time to sell? Market is probably at or slightly past its peak so can see no point in delaying here. The researcher and I chat for about 15 minutes – am I available to record the item Thursday or Friday? The crew and I end up in Waterloo Place near The Mall and my thirty seconds of fame is all recorded in about 10 minutes. In spite of all the doom and gloom, there is no reason to put off buying a property if you can afford it. Lender’s interest rates are coming down, there is a lot of unsold property on developers’ books and if you rent for a long time, you are probably paying off the landlord’s mortgage. The difficulty here is that deposits now need to be around 10 per cent.

The feature goes out at about 6.30 p.m. Friday after the main news but a taster is shown at lunchtime and I get three phone calls – nice to be popular but haven’t reached my Andy Warhol 15 minute quotient yet.

The week started with a blitz on pension advice at a firm of management consultants where a lot of new guys have joined and in spite of a generous benefits package, no one has given them any advice. Eight people talk to me and all goes well except for one guy who wants to borrow against the value of his pension pot. This is not possible with the type of scheme involved and switching to a self-invested scheme (similar to a 401 (k) in the US) will involve much higher charges.

No point in reinventing the wheel, so here is a link from The Scotsman on the 10 Commandments of Pension Saving http://business.scotsman.com/personal-finance/10-commandments-for-pension-saving.4071211.jp

The Friday networking group BRX Bond Street http://www.brxnet.co.uk/bondstreet/index.html has a real buzz about it now with 3 new members in as many weeks. Visitors include a lady who makes chocolate, a jeweller who does bespoke jewellery and another lady looking for water- and energy-efficient products. Another lady visitor puts out request for the ladies only – can they help a journalist friend of hers who is doing a feature on gold-digging men!

My first podcast, a guide to the site, has been recorded and will be uploaded shortly – watch this space!

Out of the blue come two tickets for Tchaikovksy’s Eugene Onegin at Glyndeburne Opera http://www.glyndebourne.com/ courtesy of a lodge member who is a professional opera singer. As it is the final dress-rehearsal, smart casual rather than evening dress is OK.

Finally, a friend from Hollywood is in town and we end up putting the world to rights in Bayswater till past midnight. His film The Listening http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427461/ is doing very well and will available on DVD in the UK 28th May.

A good weekend to you all.

With the following week full again of pension surgeries, client and professional introducer meetings, the May Bank Holiday weekend is perfectly timed. Come Saturday evening and it is high time I visited Shakespeare’s Globe but it is Hobson’s Choice of King Lear in the afternoon, same in the evening, no other productions till Tuesday at Shakespeare’s Globe when yes, it is King Lear again. Having not done this play at school or seen it, I join the queue for returns 15 minutes before the evening production starts at 7.30. The 700 £5 groundling (standing) tickets having been long sold out, only two Lower Tier tickets (£33) are finally available which I gladly accept. The programme describes King Lear as Shakespeare’s most awesome tragedy and we take our places just in time.

In the only tragedy of Shakespeare set in Great Britain, Old King Lear is tired and wants to give away his kingdom to his three daughters. The largest share will go to the daughter who shows the most love to their father and when the youngest one Cordelia declines to go along with this, she is banished and disinherited. Her perceived ingratitude, plus the behaviour of her two sisters unhinges the old king. Later he is turned out into a terrible storm by the two daughters who had previously flattered him and received their inheritances. With plenty of drama with the occasional bit of humour, this works very well as a play but any parent who decided to settle their inheritance matters this way would be asking for trouble.

In the dialogue, come phrases one has heard before: take it or leave it, more sinned against than sinning. In one of Shakespeare’s small touches of genius, the most profound words to the king come from the jester or fool “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise“.

Nostlagia and a promise take us to Cambridge the next day reminding me of what a wonderful place it was to grow up in. Most memorable this time are two pubs. Firstly, the Eagle Tavern in Benet Street with its RAF bar and famous ceiling. This is covered with writing made by cigarette lighters, candles (and occasionally lipstick) of servicemen & sweethearts from the RAF and US 8th Airforce from 1943 to 1969. Notes on the wall identify the units and some of the people who might have smoked their name or unit on the ceiling one day and never came back. If this wasn’t enough, Crick and Watson also got their idea for the structure of DNA here, for which there is a blue plaque – must look for that next time.

Down by the river, Scudamore’s are doing a brisk trade is hiring punts but we do not stay long enough to see anyone fall in. Out in the country, another nostalgic visit takes me to The Tickell Arms in Whittlesford http://www.thetickellarms.co.uk/ formerly roost of landlord Kim Tickell. What was a pub at my last visit in my student days is now an up-market restaurant and if you like a place with atmosphere, this has it in spades. Blue candles, mahogany tables, soft lighting, a large pond with two black swans, a huge wine list with helpful comments finally lead me to choose an Australian rosé from Magpie Wines called The Thief. It is Sunday evening and sadly, no food is available – only wine. My enquiry if they perhaps have any olives or snacks to help soak up the lovely wine meet with the response that they do not keep that sort of thing behind the bar.

The dictionary defines Schadenfreude as enjoyment in the discomfort of others and is something within all of us, witness the popularity of shows like Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity get me out of here! In its previous life, The Tickell Arms attracted much custom in anticipation of this, courtesy of the landlord – you just hoped it wasn’t you at the wrong end of it. On my previous visit, a young guy who was giving his partner a gentle peck on the check while they were sitting at the bar was bawled out by the landlord in his trademark knee-breeches, white stockings and silver-buckled shoes “We don’t want that sort of thing in here! If you are hungry, there is food at the end of the bar!” The pub made the national press when a sign went up No CNDers and this list of undesirables got longer and longer. Reading his obituary in The Daily Telegraph a few years ago, it made me feel that the world was a duller place without him…..or so I thought.

Back to Sunday evening and our glasses are being refilled. The bottle is kept in a cooling bucket on the bar rather than at our table and we are one of only three couples. My enquiry to the manager asking if he was around when Kim was there is met by the surprising response that he still haunts the place! It seems that the afterlife has mellowed him a bit as his two or three appearances at the end of the bar near where we were sitting, have been quite benign. We finish our bottle of The Thief, but no visitations this evening.

In the real world or perhaps I should say cyberspace, my blog stats throw up an interesting array of enquiries that have ended up at George’s Blog:

What to wear at the Reform Club? Tie and Jacket for gentlemen and probably no trousers for ladies. Some kinder London clubs may keep a bag of neckties for gentlemen who have forgotten theirs.

My Agreement in Principle (AIP) mortgage application has been referred – what happens next? It is re-examined manually as the credit score obtained from the computerised application is not enough to get a clear positive decision. Just to twist the knife in the wound of harassed home buyers, lenders are now doing a second credit search between Exchange of Contracts (when you pay a 10 per cent deposit) and Completion. In the UK (not Scotland) an offer to buy or sell a property is only legally binding after Exchange of Contracts and the balance is paid on Completion. Where the lender refuses to lend the rest of the money perhaps because some new bad data has appeared on their credit history, people can (and have) lost their deposit.

Triviality in UK pensions is another regular enquiry. If your pension funds are less than 1 per cent of the Lifetime Allowance currently £1.65 million i.e. £16,500, you can take the whole fund in cash without having to buy an annuity. 25 per cent of the fund is tax-free with the balance taxed at Emergency Income Tax Rate. A lady client asked me to calculate this for her earlier this week and the overall tax rate was 35.6 per cent for a pension fund totalling just over £8,000.

Client review meetings are always enjoyable and allow me to sign off on a positive note. Previously I have mentioned one client whose bespoke suits are now one of the goodies that you get when you buy a new Bentley http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/?p=129 Another review meeting informs me that his own music archive Future Sound of London http://www.fsoldigital.com/ is now up and running with a nice steady month on month increase. Whoever said, good news is no news?

My early Friday morning walk to my networking group BRX Bond Street at the RAF Club 128 Piccadilly http://www.rafclub.org.uk/ near Hyde Park Corner, has me wondering who these smart military types are strolling the other way in their full dress uniform with medals clinking. It is of course ANZAC Day commemorating the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 in Turkey when thousands of Kiwis and Aussies died. This is a big occasion down under but not really noted in Blighty. It is warm and dry for once so their smartly-pressed uniforms do not get soaked.

At BRX we get back to our normal routine of each member doing 10 minute presentation after their usual 60 second one. The previous week we had substituted this for telling our fellow members and guests something no one knew about them. This gives me an opportunity to mention the flight of my life http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/?p=21 but the most memorable story is from one lady who mentioned an incident when she was a child in Scotland. Having grown up in the countryside there, her family moved to a cottage in the Outer Hebrides but were surprised when a neighbour enquired after a few days, why they had not seen her husband’s pyjamas on the washing line!? Her mother decided there were nicer places to bring up her children after that.

The club itself has lots of beautiful aviation pictures adorning the stairs and walls but one picture that always grabs me is a watercolour by Bob Murray showing an old Blackburn Beverley (a heavy military transport aircraft from the 1950s) landing in Kenya with Mt Kilimanjaro in the background. In the finest gentlemen’s club tradition, in the smartest rooms you are not allowed to carry bags or talk shop, gentlemen must wear ties and ladies have to wear skirts. However, the breakfast is good and it is a lovely place to start the last day of the working week. Enquiries with Google lead me to The Beverley Association http://www.beverley-association.org.uk/ an old comrades association of people who flew, worked or knew this old workhorse. Their Secretary suggests that I take a picture and e-mail it to him to see if the artist can be tracked down.

Another lodge meeting at The Old Sessions House in Clerkenwell http://www.sessionshouse.com/ has among the usual notices, apologies for absence from one member – a stuntman who has been filming the latest James Bond film in Mexico for 3 months. Just as he got back another good job appeared in Europe, so off he went again. Their next Festive Board should be very interesting when he returns.

The week is taken up with an intensive residential training course in Bristol with the Institute of Financial Planning http://www.financialplanning.org.uk/homepage_flash.cfm whose Certificate in Financial Planning (CertFP) is internationally recognised, unlike the more academic Chartered insurance Institute’s Chartered Financial Planning Certificate (CFP). Apart from being the perfect shot in the arm, it is great fun with colleagues from Edinburgh, Manchester, Preston and Old Street – just near my office in London. Just to keep us on our toes, the trainer plays the banjo!

Reading the paper in coffee breaks shows our property market going into decline and reminds me of comments not so long ago about how safe property was as an investment. The bad news will not last for ever of course, but if your mortgage loan is nearing the end of its fixed or discounted period, it is time to get in touch with a broker. Mortgage deposits are creeping up again and apparently getting to 10 per cent, rather like 20 or 30 years ago. Manageable if mummy or daddy has equity in their property which they can borrow against and give to their offspring, but not everyone is this fortunate. Parents might also decide that they need this equity in case they need to pay for their care in old age.

Thursday is May Day and my coursework makes me forget to turn on the radio and listen to the madrigal singers from Magdalen College Oxford which are sometimes broadcast at dawn. Only the bridge jumpers make the news http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/7376954.stm At the end of the course on Thursday afternoon, feeling quite braindead, I leave Bristol for Oxford where I lived for a few years in the late sixties at about the same time as ex-President Bill Clinton when he was doing his Rhodes Scholarship (no our paths never crossed). As usual when in that neck of the woods, I unwind at the Victoria Arms in Old Marston just next to the slightly flooded river Cherwell http://thames.me.uk/s02420.htm This pub was into real ales before traditionally-brewed beers became trendy and anyone had ever heard of CAMRA http://www.camra.org.uk/

On the drive down, it is a stonking gliding day with flat firm bottoms in rows close together and I am talking about clouds http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/?p=103 To the north west, flying cross country would have been like stepping across stones in a pond.

Correspondence from my 10th April blog about mixed metaphors http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/?p=131 reveals that the kettle of fish one probably came from Laurel & Hardy although I came across it in a spy novel. My reading of Rumpole of the Bailey stories (Perry Mason with irony and some humour) by John Mortimer, reveals that the Dade county in Florida is named after an American soldier who managed lose a battle against the native American Indians. That of course was in a work of fiction, but some real info is here http://www.dadebattlefield.com/ Readers may remember Dade county from the 2000 Presidential election where hanging chads apparently decided the outcome.

On a more modest political note, today is election day for our London Mayor a post which we managed without for many years. No hanging chads here as we still put a X on the ballot paper but are told not to fold them – a new experience for me so the 3 ballot papers slide face down into the box. The local polling station was a Methodist School Hall which also sported a sign for an AA meeting – Alcoholics Anonymous perhaps?

As a treat after my studies, I had been saving What Your Sleep Position says about you http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janet-kinosian/what-your-sleep-position_b_98281.html but ironically, now find myself too tired to read it, so Good night!