Comfort with money

How you spend your money, your discretionary money that is, is a matter of your personal choice but as long as it is YOUR choice then no one should criticise what you spend it on. Having chosen to spend it, that money has gone. You have therefore lost the OPPORTUNITY to do something else with that money. When you can identify chunks of money that you have spent and calculate what income you could be making by investing that money in something else that would earn you “x” dollars, the “x” dollars you do not have is the opportunity cost   of what you spent your money on….honeymoon, deluxe wedding celebration, house, Lamborghini, European holiday, rental property, cellar filled with wine, Melbourne Cup attendance (especially if you live in Camooweal) and the list could go on forever. As long as the money is available and “affordable” (that adjective has a number of meanings) one’s personal choice dominates but that still does not dismiss the FACT that one of the costs as...

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...