Pi-Consulting

Since 1975, house prices in the UK have risen twice as fast as homes in France, Germany, Japan and he USA. Britons have gone for home-ownership with the same zeal that Americans have brought to the buying of stocks and shares. The rising value of bricks and mortar has fueled a British epidemic of borrowing and self-indulgence. The casualties are first-time purchasers. Young couples (and increasingly young singles) find it well-nigh impossible to get their feet on the first rung of the property-ownership ladder. As a result, they are turning to their parents. Britain’s Council of Mortgage Lenders now say that over 40% of first-time buyers are depending on financial help from their mothers and fathers. When the family can’t – or won’t –help out, the kids simply get left behind. Skinflint parents are now being called “SKINS”, for “Spending the Kids’ Inheritance”. Source: The Economist, Pi.

The financial industries have good reason to wean us all off cash, and to push credit cards and other forms of non-specie payment. It saves them …well, money. The minting, counting and administering of banknotes and coinage rises in cost every year. By contrast, the progressive switch to plastic and other digitally-denominated forms of payment is relentlessly driven by Moore’s Law, which cuts the cost of computer processing power approximately by half every eighteen months. Result: ever-cheaper digital transactions. The European Union estimates a saving of 50 billion Euros ($65 billion US) per year if cash were to vanish overnight. Visa and MasterCard are doing their bit by introducing plastic cards for paying bills under $25, which require neither a customer signature nor a PIN number. Now mobile phones are becoming a payment method. A few hundred thousand Japanese already pay for groceries, cinema tickets and rail travel by passing their telephone handsets over a “phone-reader” and waiting for the endearingly old-fashioned “ka-ching” noise that signals a successful payment. The death of cash? Not so fast, friends, keep a hold on your billfolds. Electronic money movements can be monitored, and the anonymity of folding-money will always remain popular with those of us who don’t want to leave a digital trail revealing our transactions to prying eyes. Source: The Economist, Pi.

Ah, retirement. Our sunset years are supposed to be like going to heaven a couple of decades before we actually get around to dying.

You’ve seen the ads, of course. We all swan around in blue blazers with gold buttons, white duck trousers and deckshoes, only pausing between cruises and bridge weeks for long enough to survey the financial pages with quiet satisfaction. Our wives can be identified by their candy-pink suits and gold shoes, and their tendency to fret about not having enough fingers to put all of their rings on. And of course we’re all so busy living a perfect, carefree existence that we don’t really have time to actually do anything.

Sounds like just another fantasy from adland, right? The peculiar thing is that this silly picture, or something rather like it, actually seems to be coming true for a significant number of older people. The difference is that the Zsa Zsa Gabor fashion-sense from the ads has given way to snappier modern styles. The significant thing is that the “after work experience” from now on has less and less to do with cats and carpet slippers. A whole generation of prospective ‘retirees’, far from slowing down, is set to take on a new lease of life. (more…)