Feet up by the Pool

Why would a supermarket exchange a piece of paper decorated with coloured squiggles and a picture of the monarch or a 'touch & beep' contactless plastic card for a basket of groceries? Money is a trick of confidence and there have been well over one hundred occasions since the French Revolution in 1789 that a currency has lost the population's confidence in its value and become worthless. It is important to understand what money is – and isn't – and that when governments can borrow and print infinite quantities of their currencies it is hardly surprising that the value of our money falls every year – the American Dollar has lost over 90% of its value in my lifetime! Inflation is the most important factor when deciding how to invest our savings and we also need to understand how much to save, how to budget, explain taxation, Bitcoin, Brexit and so much else besides.

I hope that this book and its wonderful cartoons can play some small part in helping my fellow baby-boomers, and more particularly their sons and daughters, to understand the consequences of the dramatic changes in the worlds of finance and investment. Most important of all I'm hoping to increase readers' awareness of the potential dangers of handing down outdated assumptions – particularly those relating to home ownership. Our children should be discouraged from emulating my generation's unhealthy focus on enrichment through borrowing money to buy property. I always hoped that my children would one day own their own homes, but did not encourage them to view this aspiration as an investment to be traded, or as an alternative to saving. I explain how my generation used the high inflation of the 1980's to buy our homes, but that the dynamics have now changed and made the purchase of a home infinitely more difficult and risky.

The book's title 'Feet up by the Pool' is not intended as a smug 'look at me, I'm happily retired', quite the reverse. The book is an acknowledgment of the process I went through before retirement in my early 50's. Many like me want to stop work when we've had enough – and not always when we've made enough! Whenever we decide to stop work we must understand our living costs and how much we need to have saved to fund them. I hope that this book might helps others through the same process.