Comfort with money

Back in the “good old days” we had no capital gains tax in Australia and it occasionally made some sense to add to your cost for a property to engage in negative gearing. In its simplest form this kind of “gearing”(aka “borrowing”) meant paying out more in tax deductible interest and other expenses associated with a rental property you had bought in the expectation (?hope) that at some time in the future you would sell the property at a handsome tax free capital gain. Capital gains tax added a new dimension to this financial manoeuvre but I despair of anyone whose sole aim in negative gearing is to get a tax deduction. I once used the term “positive gearing” in an article I wrote and more than one person looked at me blankly and said “ I’ve never heard of positive gearing, what is it?”. Polonius farewelled his son Laertes with the admonition.. “neither a borrower nor a lender be” which would be OK for a father sending his teenage son off to Schoolies Week but definitel...

Hot topics come and go in the press and social media and one topic that is copping a bit of air time at present is the way in which “ageism” is treated by employers, government, families, young people and “the aged”, whoever they are or choose to be. I started paid work at the age of 14 – that was 68 years ago. That was an age at which, I think, you were allowed to leave school for“real” work, 40 odd hours a week. In my case I did stay at school and then went to University and started full time work after I obtained the first of my three degrees. The last of these I got at the age of 48. A couple of years ago my two much younger co-owners and co-directors of the company that I had established at the age of 56 (and partly sold to them ten years ago) decided that it was time to retire and the business was subsequently sold so that they could fade into the commercial background. I reckoned that I still had something to give to the community and to those clients who prefer t...