Retreads in the future (or punctures on the road to retirement)

I was talking to a friend the other day who, like many of us, found 2012 to be one of the less rewarding years of his life. I notice that his was not a unique experience as a significant number of my friends have said something similar. I, myself would have to say that 2012 was one of the least enjoyable years of my life.

Hopefully my misfortunes did not in any way contribute to theirs! I do realise some of these bad experiences have a degree of infectiousness about them.

However from my observations it would appear that most of my friends who were less than thrilled about 2012 reached that stage independently of me.

It would seem that the year just gone might not have been the end of the world but it did bring a lot of nastiness from people in politics, scumbags on the streets, and the 1% for whom any slump in the marketplace was an annoyance rather than a life changing bad event.

My friend whom I started this blog about said he might take retirement this year if certain things didn’t look up for him. He is not a wealthy man who would readily choose such an option without consequences. But he is approaching the qualifying age for Universal Superannuation and feels he doesn’t want to go on struggling along for the rest of his life. He is thinking of choosing to enjoy the rest of his life rather than working himself into the grave.

This is a sentiment I can relate to. While I still have a handful of years before I am old enough to receive Super, I could well make that choice as well when the time comes, despite the fact that unless my fortunes turn around dramatically soon, I will not be ‘set up’ for retirement either.

I think 2013 is the year when we should all consider our retirement, but we need to get a couple of the myths and fairy stories out of the way first.

For many years the very well meaning Diana Crossan, our outgoing Retirement Commissioner has been egging us all on and encouraging us to think about the financial aspects of our impending retirement. This is sound advice and many of the suggestions that came from the Retirement Commission made very good sense......in theory. They would have made good sense in practice as well were it not for one thing; an increasingly large number of us need all of our income to cover our living expenses thus leaving no room for savings.

It is the very same Catch-22 that has led to our incredibly high level of personal indebtedness. I have often heard people from the generation prior to mine saying that people are mad to take out home loans as big as they regularly do these days. But what they fail to realise is that most people would never have any chance of owning a house if they had to save up a 30% deposit. They would be long in their grave before they ever got there because house prices have reached levels where even a 20% deposit is equivalent to more than a year’s wages for the average buyer. The only chance many first time buyers are likely to get is if they can wangle a home loan of 90% or more. This puts them in grave danger should they ever lose their job, which is becoming an increasingly common occurrence these days. Thus it doesn’t take a genius to work out that people who can’t afford to save money to get themselves into a house when they are young and healthy are going to be pretty well buggered by the time they reach retirement age, especially if one of the useless governments along the way has dismantled the Universal Super entirely.

But what about Kiwisaver I hear you ask? What about it indeed. Kiwisaver is not like Universal Super at all; it is an investment which means it is subject to all the pressures that any other investment is. Theoretically you could be paying into a Kiwisaver scheme all your working life and get to the end of it and find they have lost your investment. This is not as crazy as it sounds because we have already had the government tinkering with Kiwisaver and they haven’t been paying into it as they agreed to for some time now. Who will follow up and remind them on a regular basis until they make good the deficit?

Mind you I guess you could also find your government has spent your Universal Super as well. Chances are if your Kiwisaver did disappear down a hole (and into the pocket of some sharp money man) there would be nothing you could do about it because it is not a guaranteed income unlike the Universal Super was.

So I think we need to place far less emphasis on the financial aspects of retirement and more on the lifestyle implications. If this sounds simplistic, I am sorry, but some things are more important than money. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want heaps of it. It just means that when it comes right down to it, my peace of mind (or is that piece of mind?) requires that I am generally having a good time and when you don’t have any time to do things that make your heart sing, that is not a good time.

I am fortunate that I have found one thing that I quite enjoy doing and another which I love, albeit that I have discovered these roles extremely late in life. However I am also lucky that I have a whole heap of other things that I want to do when I retire. Actually I’d love to get on with many of them now, but that ugly bastard called reality says that if I try a stunt like that I will be ‘enjoying myself’ without a roof over my head and that would rather take the edge of any potential fun I might have. Thus I will have to keep scoping out those earning opportunities for a while longer yet and put my retirement ambitions to one side.

But mortality is a pretty random thing so I will be making my best efforts to have a good deal of fun in the meantime anyway. The Mayan’s were wrong (or taking the piss) but at the end of the day (not world) we just never know when that final curtain might come down. Make sure you have lots of fun in 2013; I intend to.       

Just lying around

Bigger lies than usual are forming the basis of this year’s election campaign. Hopefully the chorus of fabulists, confabulators, and downright liars will overhype things so much before November that they will be unmasked for all including the usually credulous to see.

We always get lies and half-truths from city councillors, members of parliament and heads of government departments, and election year is usually worse than other years, but this year is somewhat unusual in that our ultimate head of state is also involved.

Governor-General designate, Jerry Mateparae is right at the heart of a monstrous (in both senses of the word) cover-up over the behaviour of New Zealand troops in Afghanistan. The allegation has been made that our lads captured prisoners in Afghanistan and then handed them over the Afghan authorities and I think it is fair to say this is undeniable. But Jezza and his merry band are still trying to deny it and write off the consequences.

I gather one of their tactics has been to start arguing the semantics of the situation. Among the sillier suggestions that have been made is that we were involved in joint operations so (technically) it was our partners who were in charge and therefore guilty if anyone was of handing over people to be tortured. This is complete crap and the sort of argument one might expect from a ten year old who has been caught bang to rights.

Since Mateparae was in charge of our defence forces at the time, it is crucial we have an independent investigation into this before we even countenance having him take the job of Governor-General.

JiangQi has waded in to support the potential G-G by refusing an inquiry and throwing a few massive tito of his own into the mix. On this occasion I think his boyish enthusiasm has got the better of him and he might have just put his head in the noose with his allegations against Jon Stephenson, the journalist who broke this story in Metro. The Prime Minotaur made some pretty specific allegations which Stephenson has not only denied, but consulted his lawyer about. It would seem that he had a witness present when he was alleged to have called the PM and identified himself as Duncan Garner. Furthermore Stephenson claims JiangQi did not hang up on him at the time, but had a quite amicable conversation with him. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Stephenson taped that conversation. In fact I hope he did. I guess we’ll know soon.

So what are the other fantastical stories, fables, myths and bullshit that we have endured from the ruling party and their cronies so far this year?

Well their decision to change the rules around KiwiSaver is another example of their duplicity. This week they have confirmed what we have all been fearing for a couple of weeks; namely that the government will lower its contribution, thus breaking their contract with taxpayers ‘to make it more affordable’. That’s rich! Perhaps they could afford it if they returned their BMWs, demanded payment from Mediaworks, asked for the money back from AMI and stopped spending money on security for multi-nationals like Petrobras.

The following is a verbatim extract from the National Party policy on KiwiSaver – the one they campaigned upon at the last election:  National is committed to keeping the KiwiSaver scheme and making it an enduring and affordable scheme for members, employers, and taxpayers.

National is committed to maintaining New Zealand Superannuation payments at a minimum of 66% of the average after-tax wage.

National is committed to continuing the New Zealand Superannuation Fund in its current form and with the current contribution rate.

However what appears in our favour is that they are not planning to bring it into force until after the election. So if you want the government to hold up its end of this particular bargain, your only hope is to vote against the National Disgrace Party in November and hope like hell the other lot don’t try to pull the same stroke.

Among the other promises that are under threat is the plan to lead us to pay parity with Australia. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen while Bull Singlets is boasting to overseas investors what a great place NZ is to come to because ‘the wages are much lower than across the ditch’.

Of course most of us will have forgotten that GST wasn’t going up, either. Civil servants were being capped, but somehow (mysteriously) more than 2000 of them have gone.

Then of course we have to recall the vapid ramblings of that stupid cow Heck Yeah Parata when she was challenged about the decision to grant seismic drilling permits. She said they didn’t have the right to drill, but that is apparently completely wrong and the permit they were granted clearly states they are able to drill one well under the terms of that permit. Lady Gardiner should stick to pruning her roses.  

But to be fair, Heck Yeah was a latecomer to all of this and Jerry Brown-noser did all the really sneaky stuff like whipping this lot through without any consultation either with iwi or the general public.

So what lies in the future? Plenty more where that lot came from, I suspect. Semper Vigilans!