Callan's Porthole "My window into life on the WaterWays" : October 2021

October 2021 Nest Egg Ideas, should I have for the future?

This is a question at I often ask me self and one that every month I try to think about.

You can not go a day without hearing something about saving and investments.

Most of the time adverts are about death and life after death, for your family and loved ones.

They are about planning for your referment and also your funeral.

For me personal may saving and investment adverts never seam to be about the now.

When Covid 19 hit everyone was effect in one way or another.

In many ways those with saving and investments that could not be easy accessed or liquidated into cash I believe struggled the most.

It was these people who may have had to have made the decision about keeping their savings and investments and not looking at claiming government aid or seeing if they could "cash out" so they could.

This was due to the basic rule that if you had savings/investments over £6,000 you could not claim benefits from the government during lock down.

What a believe is that a lot of people forget about the now!

Yes in the past I did look at the future, I looked a ISA's, Help to buy my first home property schemes, yet they all seamed to have a lot of red tape wrapped around them.

So for me they where like the perfect Christmas gift, but it was like playing the "Chocolate game to get it"

Now the chocolate game for those who do not know what it is is this.

You have a block of chocolate wrapped up on a table.

To get to it you need to roll a six on a die.

You them need to put on a hat

Put on a scarf

Put on a pair of gloves

You them must run/walk over to the table that is about 3 feet away froj you.

You then must use the knife and folk to open the warped up chocolate with.

In the mean time everyone else's who is playing the game, can take it in turns to roll a six on the die too.

If they roll a six you must hand over every thing to them so that they can try to open the chocolate , you have to go back and start all over again.

Once the cholate is opened you are only allowed to eat one piece at a time, in full.

I have played this game may times ion my childhood, the winner is the one who gets to eat the last piece of chocolate and they won a full bar.

So in many ways it paid to not get a six and to let everyone else do all of the hard work for you.

Another game was a flour hill with a chocolate on top. For this one you had to make sure that the chocolate ever fell, if it did you have to eat it. So a bit like life, being a house of cards so to speak.

So one thing that I posted "gear change." was making sure that before anything else's that maybe you look at your budget first.

I try to do this once a month, and then if you have time look at how to save money, cut bill costs, spending costs and then maybe savings and investments.

One website that I do use and have found to be helpful is I have listed below along with some others.

https://www.gov.uk/

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/

https://www.turn2us.org.uk/

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/Global/Migrated_Documents/adviceguide/d-budget-sheet.pdf

Good luck.