Friday night, all’s quiet after a full week. Wife wakes up early Saturday morning with severe difficulty in breathing. Ambulance called and straight to local A&E. Oxygen produces immediate improvement and we are handed over to a new shift. Lots of health questions about allergies etc where the info is already in the hospital files, but A&E does not have access to this. It is quiet apart from a mad woman shouting and after 4 hours we are moved to an intermediate area where it will be decided whether she goes home or stays as an in-patient. Young lady doctor we met at the start of wife’s chemo-therapy in January questions us for > 20 minutes, and we are left on our own. Popping out half an hour later finds her looking at two computer screens and on the phone to a doctor who has written a medical paper which may or may not be relevant to her case (this is Saturday afternoon).

Things have quietened down so there is time to look at e-mails via my mobile. A client who moved to the US four years ago has cancer. She is pleased it has been caught early before it reached the lymph system, but part of the remedy is a single mastectomy. In 2002 she insisted that her husband had Critical Illness Cover at a cost of £100 per month but for reasons of affordability, did not insure herself.

Next e-mail is from my sister-in-law in Germany. My very fit brother (he’s a sports teacher) is in hospital. On Wednesday he feels unwell. Same on Thursday but he has promised to give some material to a colleague & does not want to let her down and prepares to go to work. Wife suggests he stays at home and fortuitously, the colleague calls round and collects the material she needs – there is now no need for him to go to work and to cap it all, he now has difficulty in walking back into the house. Family doctor is called and she is round in 3 minutes with an ambulance called shortly after. Day is spent in ICU and explanation given. A minor abdominal operation a few weeks previously has caused a thrombosis in the leg causing a lung embolism. Had this happened on a long airline flight a few weeks previously to visit family in Latin America or had he gone to work that day, he would have died.

Reminds me of one of Benjamin Franklin’s famous sayings. His best known one is perhaps, In this life nothing is certain save death & taxes but the appropriate one here might be, He that would thrive, should listen to his wife – (sorry guys).

For a change, let me step into the area of non-pension politics where the furore over MPs expenses seems to have turned into political gangrene, with the Prime Minister reluctantly giving our disgraced Speaker the elbow. But a peerage (Lord Gorbals?) plus keeping his £1.3 million pension pot may be the poison left over which will kill off the government. An earlier Prime Ministerial purge in July 1962, gave rise to the famous quip from Jeremy Thorpe (former leader of the Liberal Party) Greater love hath no man than than this, that he give up his friends for his life. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/night-of-the-long-knives-a-nasty-purge-which-shocked-even-the-dog-1434493.html For the more secular or those of you who don’t quite get it, the root of this quip is here in the New Testament http://scripturetext.com/john/15-13.htm

One Thursday am finally able to attend Open Coffee http://www.meetup.com/opencoffee/?a=wm1_gn at UCL. First contact Steve tells me about Agile Computing where he & other IT specialists team up on ad hoc basis in a fairly loose network. His experience of the waste he encounters regularly in large organisations prompts me to offload my feelings about the cumbersome CRM system I am familiar with used by half the IFAs in the UK, prompting an interesting comment: The Broken gets fixed, The Bad lasts forever! Second contact is a very bright Chinese lady busy here in the UK as a managment consultant. Nearly as much time is spent travelling round the world as is spent here and we trade backgrounds. She has had two previous business ventures which have failed she says, something few Brits would be brave enough to admit two minutes after meeting someone. Here a business failure is seen as a personal failure whereas in the US for example, the response is likley to be, Tell me about your next one. Most recent was a desktop publishing venture where modern technology could reprint that book you like, have lost or want to give someone as a present, in two minutes. Music from someone’s laptop behind me leads me to a third contact who can produce attractive corporate videos/animations very economically. He is a bit reluctant to go out for funding due to economic condidtions but I am able to point out that shortgage of money is not the main issue with start-ups. He has no business cards, does not contact me so am unable to help.

The Achilles Heel of many new businesses seems to be the business plan. Most innovators or entrepreneurs don’t have one or know how to write one. This is not a criticism, it’s just a different skillset. Business Link http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/home?domain=www.businesslink.gov.uk&target=http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/&tc=000KW021413519 runs courses on writing them while other people will charge £5-10k for one. If you really are just an ideas person, Micro Funding http://www.microfunding.co.uk/ will happily do all this for you (if they like the idea) but apparently at the cost of 70 per cent of your business.

Back in the mainstream, a client wants to take his pension benefits and the pension figures are very interesting. Client requests figures for 5 and 10 year guarantee periods as the nightmare scenario is to take your pension and die say, one month afterwards resulting in a windfall profit for the insurance company. Fortunately guaranteeing a pension payment in an annuity is cheap and the difference between having a 5 year payment guarantee period and a 10 year one here is only £18 a year.

Based on £100,000 annuity purchase guaranteed for 10 years with a 50 per cent spouse’s pension, annual income available looks like: £5,620 level (no escalation) starting at £2,780 if increasing at RPI, starting at £3,400 if escalating at 3% p.a. and starting at £2,390 with a 5% p.a. escalating income. The latter might look poor value, but the increasing payments catch up the level payments after 15 years whereas the 3% escalating payments only catch up the level payments after 21 years. Small legal point here, the estate of someone who dies during an annuity guarantee period cannot be wound up until the guarantee period has run off.