(no subject)

[ewx]

When your house is on the line you assume that the guarantees on offer are copper bottomed.

...without actually having seen the T&Cs this man was shown, I'd suggest that the more you have to lose, the less you should be assuming. Certainly the notion that the stock market can fall as well as rise should not have been unfamiliar in 1987. When does a large number of people losing a bet stop being a reminder of caveat emptor and start being a scandal?

My wife and I are going to have to work until normal retirement age and perhaps even a little beyond.

I'm finding it a little hard to be very sympathetic about this. Retiring earlier than 'normal' is surely a bonus, not a right, and not one that I think my own generation are very likely to enjoy in large numbers, if current demographic trends continue.

Comments

[gerald_duck]

Shrug. I got an endowment policy in 1998, when people were saying not to touch them with a bargepole. Yes, the stock market's not done especially well since then, but with low interest rates it's not so hard for the endowment policy to keep up with them. Also, fund management fees are lower now, and the projections I got in 1998 were obviously pretty cautious!

At the moment, the endowment is performing only a shade worse than the equivalent repayment mortgage would have. With just a little luck there'll be an economic upturn sometime in the next 15 years and I'll end up modestly ahead. If I'm very lucky the economy will do stormingly well, and I'll be used as a success story when they want to dupe the next round of suckers into buying endowments just before a stock market crash.

If I'm wrong, I just extend the mortgage by a year or two. Or even put the shortfall on a 0%-interest-for-six-months credit card. (-8

I don't think this stuff is quite as black and white as journalists like to pretend.