Ken Dodd was right: keep your investments in your mattress

When I started work, serious men advised me from the pages of every newspaper that the state pension was worth slightly less than my trousers and that I should “opt out” and put my money into a private pension. I’m not a man given easily to persuasion by the newspapers, so I got myself a properly qualified financial advisor with a briefcase and an inch of bare shin between the top of his socks and the bottom of his trousers (always a sign of high professional seriousness) who told me the same thing. Dutifully I did so.

Fast forward 10 short years and apparently my shiny private pension is worth…err… slightly less than my trousers. Meanwhile, my publically employed friends are still dreaming of retiring to the Caribbean at the age of 38 with a phalanx of blondes on hand to massage them nude with hot chocolate.

I bought a house. Interest rates were around 5% at the time. Every sage and wizened brow from the broadsheets reckoned we were in for a spell of even higher rates. I again invited a man with a beard and a briefcase round to confirm all this. Subsequently, I forked out £900 extra to fix the rate on my mortgage at 8% (or something, you get the idea) for 5 years. Interest rates suddenly and disobligingly plummeted to 3% and I had to shiver in silent indignation at all the people I’d smirked at mere months before for having tracker mortgages freely spending their extra cash on drugs, guns and hookers.

They deregulated the energy market. By switching suppliers, they told me, I could save hundreds of pounds a year on my gas and electricity bills. I signed up with Scottish Electric. Who charged me nothing for 6 months, and then suddenly £2400. And then energy prices rocketed regardless, so that any potential savings I might have made paled into insignificance as it turned out that gas was actually pricier than I imagine Megan Fox’s knickers are. Not that I have imagined any such thing.

I was looking for a car. Something for my imminent family to be secure, safe and reliably driven around in. Every single motoring journalist and industry expert in the whole of Christendom reckoned that Toyotas might be dull in the looks and performance stakes, but gold standard in the secure, safe and reliable stakes.

Ha!

Turns out that their brakes don’t work and people have been getting killed by the carload in them for years. And seeing as my Corolla is now in the garage in need of an entirely new gearbox just 3 weeks short of being paid off in full not that much cop in those stakes either.

In the interim, I bought another Toyota (a poxy little Yaris) for pootling to the shops and work and stuff and to compound my error. Being clever, I borrowed the money off my dad instead of from the evil, profiteering banks. The deal? Set up an ISA and pay the money into there until the car was covered and there might even be a little profit.

Well fuck me. Apparently even my bastarding ISA is now worth shit all of a sudden. Who’d have guessed, eh?

And this is before we even get to the really big fuck-ups that characterise governments, industry and the banks. “No more boom and bust”. “New paradigms”. “Education, education, education.” And so on.

It turns out that almost nobody knows anything and you shouldn’t listen to them – regardless of what letters they have after their name or which newspaper, think tank or policy group they write for.  If anyone tells you what the world will be like more than 6 months in advance, thank them for their opinion, kick them in the shins and do exactly the opposite of what they advise.

Thus lies open the road to happiness, prosperity and smaller electric bills.