• Sunday, 22 August, 1999 •

Pensions ...

Pensions, like death and taxes are one of life’s inescapables. How assiduous this Government has been in lecturing us on our pension responsibilities. Last week, social security secretary Alistair Darling signalled his intention to change the rules that currently allow workers to opt out of company schemes, which will affect more than a million employees. The pension industry also joins in the refrain, carrying advertisements alternating happy couples splashing out on grandchildren, with old age penury. We, the public nod sagely, agreeing that we should be shovelling as much dosh into our pensions as possible. It’s just, we can’t afford to, for the time being.

The recent Mintel report, which showed that 5.4m adults do not know when they will be able to afford a pension, made headlines, but were unsurprising. Looking at the findings, I found it more interesting that almost one in five professionals, (ABC1s) had made no provision at all, presumably while trying to keep up all that middle class front. And 52% of those pensionless families said they would start a pension, if they did not have so many other financial commitments. With mortgages, child care and living costs on rip-off island, as the tabloids now dub the UK, it looks as if we’ll all be down at B& Q in our seventies, working at dishing out advice at the gardening desk.

This dismal survey struck me as revealing ingrained customer resistance to buying pensions as a product per se. Again hardly surprising, Mintel rightly called on pension companies to make their products simpler to encourage more families to take out a pension. For even now, after all the reforms, we are still asked to buy into what appears a mysterious, not terribly advantageous product. Indeed, the pensions industry itself, still rooted in Victorian obtuseness, strikes me as bearing similarities to the mediaeval Catholic church, boarding schools, circuses, workhouses and the Monarchy. Creaking institutions of varying degrees of popularity which radically and regularly reformed or were superseded by something else.

Even the goody-two-shoes among us , who push money over to the well-established providers, do not have a clue what is going on in those huge shiny glass offices, many in the central belt. Tomorrow’s pensioners, so used now in other areas of their lives, to feeling in control and switching suppliers at whim, are somehow reduced to fourteenth century peasant churchgoers, who do not speak Latin. Just what is a FURBS, an NRA, a SDC, CPA, or, this one, my absolute favourite an UURBS? I recommend the Plain English guide to pensions available on www.plainenglish.co.uk/pensions.

The unspoken assumption by Government and the industry, is that by not putting enough aside, we are a feckless lot who’ll come bleating for a state hand out. But as we increasingly question the cost and value of other financial products, not least in this era of low inflation, the increasingly steep 1.5% charges on package investments, why should we pay up on a pension scheme. Just what is in it for us?

We are not entirely stupid. Falling gilt yields and lengthening life expectancy are driving down annuity rates and threatening the viability of money purchase schemes. In 1990, a married man with a retirement fund of 100k would have received an annuity of £10,405. Now, it is just £5,702. What tones of horror were in the voice of the analyst on the Today programme last week who, when discussing the shortfall many large company pensions schemes are facing, suggested that in future employees would be faced with ‘cheaper packages’, such as money purchase schemes, in which the employer put very little. Like stakeholder and personal pensions. Shock, horror. The very packages being pushed to the rest of us.

Now I wonder whether the hoi polloi leading the reformation? Questioning whether the creed of the pension really is the key to a aterially comfortable old age. How much greater flexibility, would we have if we saved up capital outside traditional pension vehicles, however volatile? And as for younger people, what sort of spin can the pensions industry possibly give to a product were they are supposed to pay ever higher premiums to stand still. From 2001 the Government will be introducing a new pensions regime which will ‘encourage’ millions of us to invest in money purchase schemes. Just how the pensions industry will sell them?

Next month, sees a major industry conference in London, titled Designing & Marketing Stakeholder Pensions. I would be particularly interested to see the delectable Stewart Ritchie, Director (Pensions Development) Scottish Equitable give his little talk titled ‘Is ‘Stakeholder’ a mugs game for Life Offices?’ The title seems to imply that if there is no money in fleecing the punters, why bother? Oor Stewart can tell me if I am wrong! And that’s the trouble with pension lectures – they’re too hellishly boring to sit through to find out!

Clearly there are pressing problems in the structure of pensions which are going to need to be addressed and soon. At least at the moment, the bull market has meant that pensioners have been retiring with bigger pension pots, but for the rest of us who might be facing more bearish stock market conditions, the annuity rates hardly inspire us to save. Alistair Darling standing over us like Fraser in Dad’s Army telling us we’re all doomed, is not going to change that.

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 8 August, 1999 •

Baby Boomers ...

When will the Baby Boomers grow up? Sadly probably never. It was therefore amusing to sample the mildly outraged tones in reports last week, that Exodus, a tour firm which runs overland African expeditions lasting five to thirteen weeks, has banned the over-forties from selected trips. "We are being ageist," a company spokesman admitted. "We just find it works better."

That such a ban should be considered newsworthy, underlines the huge audacity of the Baby Boomer generation, that is, anyone born between 1946 and 1964. We feel that we are young and trendy in perpetuity, as if by divine right. We are the majority generation, we shall not be ignored. The term midyouth, first coined by an article in American Demographics in 1995 has caught on and boy, we intend to fight on the beaches and in the African scrub over every wrinkle. There are just so many of us you see; in the US alone there are 76 million. Yet who would have us as a generation
on top? How we must squash down on the younger Generation X-ers with our buying might and our absurd pretensions.

Sir Chris Bonington was quoted in the press as suggesting that the Exodus ban was 'rather sad', that mixing up generation gave different a perspective. But though a wise man with his eyes habitually fixed on the high peaks of life, he is missing the point. There is nothing more irritating than having to make conversation with older people who, while trying to recapture their lost youth, constantly pull economic rank. If I were 28 with a huge mortgage, would I really want to trudge through the African bush with some paunchy plonker, boasting that his house which he bought for £75k in 1983 is now worth £500K – more, if he put in a conservatory.

We are the selfish generation driving the stock market and the huge hikes in property prices in certain parts of the country. "We’ve never had it so good," said property expert John Wrigglesworth, quoted in The Times last week while predicting house price inflation of 10% this year. "Lenders are falling over themselves to give away mortgages . Baby Boomers are buying like crazy, and there’s an acute shortage of family accommodation." Try spending five to thirteen weeks with someone like that, while you and your wife and baby are wondering how to trade up from your two bedroom flat without taking out a 100% mortgage.

Of course, we Baby Boomers have our own nemesis. Get a group of us together over a designer beer and listen to us moan about having to be nice to our parents’ generation born pre-War, who now sit on hugely valuable assets, blown up by years of bull markets and inflation. What a cushion of superiority these crinklies have! ‘We did without in the War, so its double cream and cruises for us. "If we are imaginative, we must realise what it is like for those coming up behind. Recently I was chatting to a twenty-three year old at the hairdresser’s. ‘ Oh, I never read the money pages," she
said. "Nor do my friends. Because it’s for people of your age who have money to invest, who can afford houses. How can I afford a mortgage when I’ve got £8,000 student loan to pay off?"

The generation gap is of course most noticeably about music, memories and fashion. Why do the young not wear jeans any more? Just watch those sixty year olds waddling around Princes Street in them. And OK, you went to Notting Hill and came out singing all the lyrics of She, but admit it, you learned them not from the recent Elvis Costello hit but from the Charles Aznavour 1974 original. Yet the real aching generational chasm between Us and Them, is not style, but Money; the unfair carving up of the economic cake. Which generation has the most and which would like some. You know Baby Boomers are calling the shots on the news agenda, when you read all our celebratory copy over house price rises. Who ever heard of anyone
celebrating a price rise? Unless of course you hold the supply.

For hard-line Baby Boomers who like to flaunt it, may I recommend the American Association of Baby Boomers, a US not-for-profit lobby group . Their tasteful logo is a baby banging a drum decorated with stars and stripes. Check out their right-on website! Their Home Page offers Nostalgia, Advocacy, Benefits and Bonding. Pay just $12.50 and you too could receive their quarterly magazine Boomtime – strapline Boomers Just Want To Have Fun! Packed with advice on DIY investment plans – ("are you the type of person who dives into the business section of the paper before
your coffee fix?") to wealth strategies on real estate and pension planning. It ‘s cute, it’s hip, it’s – so groovy!

Baby Boomers, we have now realised, are the Market! It is our buying decisions which call the shots, whatever the youth worshipping marketing men might think. We’re the Have A Nice Day generation, who have gone from LSD to lattes, from Hula-Hoops to cellphones. We like to pretend that business is fun, a bit of a game – he who gets the most toys wins the prize. What fun! we are a generation of Edinas, while those in their twenties and early thirties , look on, like Saffy, unsmiling and overgeared.

So, ask yourself: would you have a five week holiday with us?

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 1 August, 1999 •

Taking stock ...

Last week there was much scoffing in the media about the Government’s annual report. Perhaps this arose from the juxtaposition of its publication with Tony Blair jetting off to Chiantishire. We don’t like our leaders to enjoy themselves. For me, £2.99 price tag was a cheek. Presumably, the message is that we are buying-in to UK plc, so whoever heard of shareholders paying for an annual report? The content naturally sparkled. Retaining the state earnings related pensions was apparently a pledge delivered on. 'Kept' it said, in spite of Serps being abolished in the next parliament. It might as well have said 'Sorted,' so matey was the inclusive English.

Yet PR gimmick though it was, the idea of doing an annual report at this time of year is inspired. When the sun is managing to shine even in Scotland and you can slob about in shorts, now is the time to audit your own financial position, benchmarking it against last year and setting targets for next. This exercise has to be done at some point. March is when newspapers usually say we should assess our wealth and invest money to mop up our tax allowances. In reality most people I know are still paying off Christmas and, if we are self employed, January’s tax too, so these
exhortations seem irrelevant. Other natural breaks are Christmas (too expensive) and Hogmanay (too sloshed), so summer is best for financial MOTs, before the kids go back to school and we have to dig out the balaclavas. Avoid your IFA when doing this, it is a very private exercise. "This feel-good boom is really just built on financial products flogged to people like me, a friend said last week" All my money just goes out each month, but am I making progress?” That’s the really expensive question.

We are a nation of green-eyed monsters, and too often we look over our shoulders while assessing our own personal wealth. Last week, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Report Wealth In Britain: A Lifecycle Perspective showed that the average British family is now worth £50,000. Top of the heap of course are the retired at £164, 000 who have paid for both homes and pensions, while bottom of the heap as you might expect are the young single (£1500) and the single parents (£4,000). Reading such reports invariably produces strong emotions of smugness and envy, whereas your own financial progress is only accurate and effective when benchmarked against your wealth as it stood the previous year.

Kick off by listing your property’s value (honestly) minus mortgage, value of pensions, investments and saleable assets (avoid all Antiques Roadshow
salivating). Then count total year’s debt before tackling – Income. This we tend to lump into wealth, regardless of real spending, particularly if we have pay rises or promotion. But income is a quicksand of self-deception. Instead, benchmark outgoings. Direct debits on utilities etc. are easy-peasy . It’s those anonymous cashline withdrawals and what they are secretly spent on, which is the nub of our monthly financial profile. Most of the time of course we don’t want to know. It looks too debauched/self indulgent to say wine £70 pm, chocolate £20, clothes £100, cosmetics £50. It always
starts a row too because he never understands your spending needs nor you his. But persevere, even if you find your income turns out to be just a generous donation into the pot – the rest made up with plastic and overdrafts.

Another survey last week for Abbey National – what a time of year this is for surveys – showed that the average working family is richer than ever but time-poor and is currently spending £5k+ pa in services to save time including a cleaner, two carry-outs a week, ironing, and hired help for DIY, gardening etc. I thought this figure rather conservative given the other needs – clothes, shoes, post-work alcohol, office meals out etc. Interestingly, 30% of the 1000 adults interviewed by NOP said they did not have time to manage day to day finances. Another indication that working full-time costs you money.

Whatever unpalatable truths are revealed, it has to be better to know the truth, because there always has to be a reconciliation somewhere down the line. Overspending now by just £200 a month, even if part of this involves saving virtuously in tax free vehicles, could well turn out to be that remortgage in 2004. Ignore the temptation too to spend just because house values have risen, for unless you wish to cash in and move to a Highland croft, it doesn’t mean much. Real wealth comes from feeling in control, knowing the reality of our financial position however challenging and
placing it along our own time line. We also must divorce our own reality from the parallel universe of those perhaps 30,000 senior professionals in London and Edinburgh, who at the moment are earning life-changing money. Most of us are not spending our evenings on-line playing U.S.style with our portfolios, so we cannot afford to believe all the rosy financial headlines – the economic cycle has not been abolished no matter what the new paradigm punters might say – any more than we can afford to believe all the Government tells in its annual report.

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 25 July, 1999 •

Holidays ...

Three weeks away, I return to face mounds of unopened post and e-mails. Credit card junk mail looks strangely tempting after three weeks in France eating moules frites, but I desist and hit the bin at six yards. Have you been away? Friends ask amazed. I am not a holiday taker by nature. Partly because I love my home and partly because I hate handing over so much money.

It was the Scots’ attitude to family holidays which struck me most when I returned here permanently in 1995. “Should I take 4k or 5k for spending money?” a friend asked, one night at our local. My look of horror persuaded him that this was unreasonable, so he took 6k instead. He’d been talking Florida after all. Another friend sheepishly admitted over fish and chips that their family holiday in Canada had put them back £15k. I nearly choked. Personally any family holiday where I do not get change from a thousand pounds is anathema. Call me old fashioned. But for you Scots in the nineties, it’s skiing holidays, time shares, cruises with regular trips to Crieff Hydro in between. Maybe it’s the weather, but the Scots certainly know how to show themselves a good time.

And on the other end of this island too, on England’s south coast they are flaunting it bigtime, so great is the volume of cash splashing around. The night before ferrying across to Normandy we spent the night in Poole. Friday evening. The sun still packed a punch and the restaurant and bar crowds spilled out onto the streets. Men sported nipple rings and tattoos, women gold chains and big hair. We walked on past the scores of luxury yachts moored in the harbour. Their owners were not just flaunting cash, several boats flew the St George’s flag. Ingerland! One, the Tigre D’Or was like a giant floating creamcake, obviously the spoils of City piratings in the far east. A brief memory surfaced of Donald Trump greeting friends onto his yacht on the Hudson River back in the eighties; nowadays in comparison the money being flashed about, whether real or lent, makes the eighties seem cheap.

Next morning at our small hotel while the wife was frying up the bacon, the husband settled down to drinking vintage port in the sun. It was 9am. His paunch was generous, his tattoos mesmerising. Poor old German guests were complaining by how expensive Great Britain was and I remembered how the Germans stuck us in the seventies when the British first started going abroad in huge numbers. How rich and how fat so many of them seemed to us then. How we hated their deckchair nabbing guts! Don’t you know there’s a war on? could have been written in cartoon bubbles, for then, there were three day weeks petrol shortages, the British Disease and inflation, which we had not then realised was such a Godsend for getting the hard-pressed middle classes out of trouble.

Now the jackboot is on the other foot for whether paying in cash or plastic funny money the UK has caught luxury fever from the US. Max Bialystock style, if you got it baby, flaunt it. As the hotel proprietor enthused about the booty in fags and booze his cheap day trips to France netted him twice a month – 1500 Benson & Hedges, magnums of Bolly – I sensed the same indiscipline with sudden wealth the Germans suffered from back then. It’ll all end in tears I said. My husband said I was sounding like wee Rab’s ‘Mary doll.’

Our part of Normandy seemed untouched by time and Thatcherite restructuring. Prosperous farmers sold their produce at the market and house prices – 45K for a three bedroom detached house made me dream. Even our car looked rather grand parked in the local square. Youth unemployment is high; the local mayor’s son, a manager in meat packing spoke perfect English, describing how he had been working in Northern Ireland. No work here he said with a gallic shrug. I remembered recently how strange I found the sight of Frenchmen driving buses in London.

The exchange rate is just on 10 francs to the pound which opens up feasts of smoked salmon and champagne. I go shopping in the local Ecomarche – keeping the bill as reminder to feel ripped off whenever I go up to our local Safeways. 8 pains au chocolat 11frs , packet of saucisses 7.65frs, 1 large tin of petits pois 4.45frs. I read a two day UK paper to find British supermarkets are whinging about price comparisons. They must think we came up the Clyde on a bike. Why, after twenty years of mass travel has it taken so long to realise just how ripped off we are? It must be our feudal heritage, for unlike the French, we are reluctant revolutionaries. We hate change and making a scene. Why, because we were told by advertisers that our food is good value, did we automatically assume it was? Certainly the ancien regime at M&S should have been pushed onto tumbrels years ago, but the Brits are a sentimental lot who prefer the familiar however high the price.

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 20 June, 1999 •

Childcare ...

In the next few days, Scottish mothers, when not preparing for six weeks of treats and exhaustion, are organising childcare for the next school year. On Friday when the application form arrived for my children’s Afterschool Club I was so filled with gratitude, I almost kissed the cheque. For I am traumatised by years of expensive childcare which has cost me tens of thousands of pounds, leaving the exposed raw nerves of an ex-hostage. Even now, after escaping from nanny hell, I find it very difficult to greet with untrammelled joy the phrase. "x and I are having a baby." Earth Mothers are thin on the ground these days, for partners expect you to earn something, so this sentence should now be translated as "x and I are going to spend £100K out of taxed income, on top of our mortgage and pension!" Yippee!

Nanny sagas are a key symptom of a booming economy. And so tabloid tales last week about Nicola Horlick’s nanny who won £13,000 from an industrial tribunal for unfair dismissal seemed poetic justice for the woman who sold us the manifestly absurd line that we can have it all. The story interested me too, for while I have never produced her amount of income or offspring, I recognised only too well, the high stress lifestyle that the career nanny both feeds and services. How typical was the stressed hysterical reaction of Tim Horlick who allegedly screamed at Nanny backing her into a corner. Nannies always form a hell menage a trois. As the second income earner, he was probably paying her salary and this coming on top of the mega-mortgage, long office hours plus parenting five children, makes me surprised that when he finally snapped they merely sacked her. The emotions your childcare can unleash can be savage.

Childcare costs are the great unmentionable in financial planning and you only realise how grievous they are when the bundle of joy is lying in your arms. Many Scottish women have mothers who help out, but for the rest of us, childcare becomes the second mortgage or the cushy pension you might have had. Forget your looks and social life, no one told us was an absolute monthly fortune babies cost! That is the great secret joke which keeps the human race reproducing.

I have now decided that young people should be encouraged to start saving for their child care 'mortgage' years before they meet their partner or have children. The New Childcare Mortgage could be a real winner for a savvy provider – Virgin naturally – which could market it principally to young professional women as a domestic dowry to be drawn down when they finally reproduce. I ring round a few agencies. A live-in nanny in Scotland is £110 p.w. net, £145 gross including stamp, requiring £10,000 taxed income. Nurseries and child minders work out at £100 a week requiring £6,200 taxed income. Au pairs seem cheap at £40 - £50 a week but they all eat like horses and require so many treats. they work out at about the same, with linguistic irritations on top. I ring my IFA, himself bleary-eyed with a new baby, who tells me that this amount equals annual repayments on a £90K mortgage, approx. £40K more than the average Scottish mortgage. The childcare hell lasts a shorter time than a mortgage, but the cost of school holidays care is steep and must be averaged out until each child is 14.

My IFA tells me he wishes there had been such a thing as a Childcare Mortgage when he was out drinking with his mates in his early twenties. But that now he would recommend a unit trust / ISA where fees could be taken out after a period and put into a bank account to subsidise monthly child care, or a Maximum Investment plan such as offered by M&G or Scandia which though having higher charges and less flexibility with payments, could be left once matured and drawn down termly .

As it is, I suspect that a huge number of professional middle income women in Britain with children are working at a loss. For while the sums for childcare might add up on paper – just – if one adds in the wear and tear, shoe leather and convenience foods, drycleaning and all the other necessities, you could soon head into negative earnings. All these years we have been in the market place and still no Government has given us tax deductible childcare, with the effect that too often we subsidise our employers and the economy and carry the debt as the prerequisite of parenting.

Unfortunately too, like the Lottery grant givers, grandparents however generous, prefer capital projects which grandchildren can see, rather than providing core funding to keep the machinery of their children’ s earning power ticking over. Perhaps, coming from a gentler age, they want us to give up our career and pensions for full time motherhood . But, long term, this is really not an affordable option either. So a mother’s place remains in the wrong and in the red.

Antonia Swinson will be appearing at James Thin Booksellers, George Street Edinburgh on Monday 19th July at 6.30pm.

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 13 June, 1999 •

Children and money ... DIY!

Teaching children about money is about as impossible for most parents as teaching them about sex. In fact most grown-ups I suspect hide their banks statements from their kids with every bit as much care as they would hide a packet of condoms. Our own money is personal, it exposes frailties, status and inadequacies too sharply for much discussion. Yet in this information age, children are learning about money with the same voracity as they learn about sex. Which can discomforting when they start asking questions on economics we don’t understand .

The buzz phrase, Financial Capability has become fashionable lately. While most of us left school with only the haziest notion of how to run a current account, the Government is to educate the young about money – if only for save the State having to support the improvident. And thus the Financial Services Authority has recently announced a major new plan to integrate financial education for children from five upwards in the revised national curriculum from September 2000. Scotland is even more up to speed. Last week the consultation period ended for the paper on Education for Financial Capability being prepared by the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum, sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland, which will make recommendations to Scottish Ministers. Some materials are expected to be in schools next year with the rest ensconced in the curriculum by 2000. If only half their recommendations are accepted, stand by for a new generation of Scottish Warren Buffets.

The SCCC faxed me the targets. By the age of 7 most children will have discussed why money is needed and explained why people are paid and have decided on the best way to use their money (still a mystery to most mummies and daddies.) By 9 they will prepare simple budgets and decide on different savings accounts and compare different standards of living. By 13, children will calculate gross and net pay, investigating cash flow and balance sheets, and explain the effect of taxation on earned income, and by 18 they will be using the Internet to access information on investment and discussing ethical investment, sustainable growth and preparing reports on different types of borrowing. By which time one imagines they will be ready to take over from running any Bank in the country.

Impressive stuff. Clearly there is role for financial institutions to play, if only to make up the shortfall in state funding. It is absurd to object, as some have, on the grounds that they have a vested interest. The private sector should be encouraged to invest and anyway children pick up very quickly when they are being schmoozed. But the limitations must be recognised. This information will tend to be product driven Children will discuss credit cards, mortgages, pensions, savings accounts etc. and why they should have them, but not necessarily why they should not have them. The other challenge is that teachers are supposed to do the teaching. They are not only already overloaded, but, given teaching has reasonable job security and pensions the rest of us would kill for, they do not have the experience of portfolio careers, unemployment and pension challenges their pupils will face.

There is also that M word we’re all so scared of. Morality. Learning about money‘s tools is useful, just as teaching children about the various pros and cons about condoms and the Pill can come in handy, but it does not inform our behaviour. Without morality there is no protection for children against peer pressure and unscrupulous older people or dare I say it, financial institutions. This one must be down to parents however we much we wriggle and we have to live our good example too, for children never learn by ‘do as I say’ .

Money must be taught holistically as part of developing high personal standards. Personally I do believe that financial behaviour, like sexual behaviour, is linked to personal self-esteem. Psychotherapists will tell you that sexual promiscuity is often a sign of low self worth. The financial equivalent is surely depressive spending and the cycle of the debt junkie. Conversely, there is nothing which makes you walk as tall as having savings and feeling in control of your finances. How difficult it is for us parents to teach all this self-discipline when we have a hard enough time getting through the month and are ourselves, the products of our own upbringing and insecurities. But we have to try, somehow. And harder than ever, for money is increasingly unreal. Whereas our parents or grandparents took us shopping locally where coins were counted out on the counter and even wrote down what was spent each day in big housekeeping books, now we scoot round supermarkets paying invisibly by plastic, or shop on the Internet at the touch of a mouse.

How can we get the balance right? Yesterday I overheard my six year old daughter giving a stern financial lecture to her latest Barbie doll (bought by Daddy, a far softer touch than Mum ). “ Now, no more dresses! They cost a lot of money. You have to have learn to budge it.” She had, I noticed, dropped her Scottish accent and was now mimicking her mother’s London vowels. I crept downstairs. Knowing Barbie, she will no doubt wait for Ken to come back from work and budge him. Another useful financial lesson my daughter has already learnt, which school may not cover.

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 6 June, 1999 •

Antonia finishes her third novel ...

This week I have been powering through the final chapters of my third novel oblivious to almost all sounds and news around me. NATO bombs fall where they may, the Dow may have the summer jitters but still I pound away on the WP, stopping only to run my husband to railway station, only to find a large group of young Kosovans – unexpectedly well-dressed in black leather jackets and Raybans – with their possessions in laundry bags, queuing to get the London train, obviously having taken one look at their genteel new home in sunny East Lothian and said no thanks palski in fluent Albanian. After the harrowing sights on TV, I find this rather reassuring.

Then small snippets of information have filtered through, curiously animated in my mind like characters running through an early zeotrope. Thus London friends tell me that the latest miracle to come along for City charismatic evangelicals – after they are lying on the floor having had their Toronto blessing you understand, is – wait for it and what a delicious fusion of wealth and religion this is – gold dust on their hair and clothes which miraculously has fallen from their Bibles! Love it. Being a meat and potatoes Anglican myself I cry Victor Meldew style ‘I don’t believe it’, as I end one chapter and begin another. Yet how comforting this must be for these happy clappies. For times I learn are getting harder down south. Next I hear that three London friends have been out to dinner recently where the hosts apologised for not being able to afford meat! Curiouser and curiouser and hot on this, comes news from another expat Scot goes to a fancy charity auction held by the wife of an old Etonian chum only to find that old Etonian hubby who’s supposed to be rolling in Square Mile dosh, could not afford to bid! Shock, horror ! Finally last week the London Evening Standard reported that smart London house prices are falling. Now this explains a lot, (especially the gold dust). I permit myself a small smile of triumph as I pound away. Will my hero get the blonde? Who’s going to go bankrupt before Chapter 13? Who cares? Prices of detached houses in Wandsworth are down by 100K! There is a God!

Miscellaneous nuggets of financial information fed to wild-eyed women who are metamorphosing from reasonably sensible journalists into eccentric lady novelists do not a story make. Yet in such a state one’s picks up nuances one might normally miss. I am also filled with deja vue. There is Paul Merton on TV pushing loans for those with zero credit ratings just as Barry Norman pushed The Mortgage Corporation at the height of the late eighties property boom. And just as Michael Douglas alias Gordon Gekko trumpeted that greed is good in ‘Wall Street’, so life now imitates art with Barbra Streisand hooked on Internet day trading. Only this time the figures are much much bigger.

And certainties that once were solid rocks to live one’s life by, seem to be floating away . In a recent letter to the FT a reader, deploring the lousy level of return on his pension, has decided to invest for his retirement elsewhere and wondered what the consequences would be for fat, complacent pension industry if everyone else did the same. I visit my IFA, and force myself to concentrate on our annual review. My nice ethical pension with Friends Provident has performed well, on course if I wish to maintain the lifestyle of a church mouse (minus gold dust), but another friend meeting his IFA that day finds that 1500 units on this Standard Life pension has gone AWOL without apparent explanation. To misquote Dr. Johnson there is no more glorious sight than a Scotsman who discovers part of his pension is missing.

And yet that other well touted pension strategy is also falling out of bed, as we learn that the buy-to-let stampede which has transformed the most shy unassuming people you know into rampant landlords across the Central Belt, is coming unstuck as rent levels plummet. I dream of renting in the Edinburgh New Town for at least five minutes until my agent orders me not to leave my desk. I produce 8000 words in three days (and nights) and then, in the thick fog which always comes after writing like this, a lawyer friend rings. In her early forties after a lifetime as a career mistress’s dreamgirl, she has been made redundant and now faces unemployment with a mega-mortgage and a middle class lifestyle to sustain. She reads me a postcard written by her rich mummy and daddy who are sunning themselves in the Caribbean. “Lovely to have 3 1/2 weeks restful (underlined) holiday after recent hectic touring trips to various parts of the world. “

“Why don’t you write a piece on selfish, loaded grandparents who do b*** all for their children and swan around while we go bust!” she spits. I weakly plead finishing a novel for an excuse. For in my small fictional world, my characters are all busy being money mad and doing all the naughtiest things on the wrong point of the economic cycle. And a few days’ financial fiction is a blessed relief from trying to make sense of the economic times we are living in. Antonia Swinson’s second novel The Cousins’ Tale is out this week in paperback (Flame £6.99).

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 30 May, 1999 •

LETS, spending power without guild ...

Were we surprised by news last week of the Italians' special economic brand of Euro fudge? No we were not! In common with the rest of the human race I suspect, the arguments for and against  the Euro have recently raged around my ears, in mounting confusion but actually I am beginning to  find the whole debate increasingly off-beam. For already  we  deal in a multiplicity of  currencies in our daily lives – smart cards, air miles, supermarket tokens and loyalty card bonus points which can be redeemed for goods, as well as  local exchange trading schemes. Money is ever more represented by intangible processes with Bacs, direct debits and standing orders  stealing in and out of our accounts. And so even in the most orthodox bits of Euroland who would want to be reduced to just one single currency?

Notes and coins now form only 3% of transactions and the process of making money a communal fiction  has been   exacerbated by the Internet where we  increasingly choose to make virtual purchases in virtual shops. Consequently the  concept of debt no longer hurts or stigmatises as it once did for being part of the fiction, it has been transformed into  gearing. On the other side of the balance sheet our virtuous savings are whisked away to become  chips in a glorious  game of markets  played by those interested in making money out of money rather than matching those with money to those who need it. As we now rarely have real dosh in our paws, there is  a sense of powerlessness, which perhaps explains our  apathy  towards notices of  investor meetings  as well as  next month's  European elections. "Buy-in" that buzz phrase occurs most effectively within small units, where the distance between the manager and the managed is smallest. And so it is with money systems. 

Readers of this column will know that I am a devotee of LETS. Local exchange trading schemes. There are now 50 in Scotland with over 450 in the UK as a whole. My own local system  East Lothian LETS now has 130 members and is growing like a weed.  It has reached the  point that  I always ask myself first if I can buy or supply in local currency. Our family commitment is strong, for this  is a currency we have chosen, rather than one foisted upon us. We  have a real stake in its success. Since January this column would have  been written on the  back of an envelope if not for the expert ministrations of my resident LETS computer whiz. My  new website, was also paid for in LETS, a fact which left my smart London publishers touchingly  mystified.

Or course friends, particularly those flying high in the cash economy  put my passion for LETS down to eccentricity. 'Just use cash', they cry. But they miss the point. For if money represents units of energy, LETS currency represents local energy spent locally, unlocking local talents for local benefit. It does not disappear in a flick of a Switch card to feed profits for distant shareholders. Interest is not paid on negative or positive balances, for this money is  neutral. As Ed Mayo observed recently in the New Statesman, new currencies see that interest is simply a way of allocating a charge for the use of money. LETS shows it doesn't need to be that way.    

Of course being a grass roots movement LETS has until recently been treated slightly sniffily by the business community. Perhaps there has been a whiff of open-toed sandals and brown rice about it, which for those on the corporate greasy pole, has proved off-putting. Yet as society and business, becomes more partnership orientated and community-minded so  LETS is joining the mainstream. This process is accelerating for now  so many schemes are reaching critical mass.  Stirling & Alloa LETS  now has  400 members, Moray 250, Edinburgh  LETS 150, Falkirk 150, and in Glasgow the various schemes are considering amalgamating for a Glasgow-wide currency.  For local organisations in rural Scotland there is LETS intertrading  through SOCS – Scottish Organisational Currency System run by Rural Forum. LETS has also a key role to play with local employment,  for example  supporting  local arts and crafts also  enables  suppliers to the tourism industry to survive  through the winter months.  Interestingly Stirling LETS (dealing in Groats) has recently  joined the local Chamber of Commerce deriving big benefits in help in kind. Volunteers man their Irvine Place office, and hold   a trade fair and auction held  every six weeks. 

Perhaps the names of the various currencies have not helped business credibility. I remember bringing the house down at  my local traders' association talking about Glasgow Kelvins, and St Andrew Fifies and Edinburgh Reekies. Money is too serious a subject. Which  is perhaps the  trouble with conventional economic systems.  Money in the making and the spending  should allow us to have more fun than it does at present. Our stress levels  are sky high as we  work the longest hours in Europe and  if we are fathers, see our children on an average of 8 minutes a day, according to one recent survey. Our shopping trips to crowded malls stress us out still further, for the conventional cash economy be it in sterling or euros  reduces us all to walking smartcards. Whereas  LETS  is a community economy which empowers all of us at local level. We, the little people,  matter. It means spending power without guilt. A glorious feeling.  Put that in your Duisenberg and smoke it. 

Letslink Scotland 01738 62263 or 01324 636571

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 23 May, 1999 •

The Scary Cost of being Middle Class ...

I have thought for some time that  it really is a very bad thing to be middle class. Note I do not say educated, for there is surely nothing  more exciting. (In fact a principle objection  I  have to dying is having to leave one's  books behind.)  But  to be   middle class in a buoyant economy  in  a  family where the parents are anything under 55, is,  unless you have strong character, lots of inherited money  and sky-high career prospects, a form of living death in a people mover. 

For  the very nature of being middle class means aggressive and expensive fights  for resources such as housing, schooling and childcare  throughout  our prime income generating years.  Everyone sees us as a target market to be wooed and exploited, while somehow we are also supposed to provide for our nice  middle class pensions as well. By thirty  usually we are defining our  lifestyle by what we spend not what we earn.

The result is that we are  perpetually discontented  and under stress  for the grass is always greener and more designer-chic on the other side and the list of middle class wants is without end. Our children too grow up under crippling stress knowing what they will to provide in order to join the club. 

A few days ago Daniel Johnson wrote a  piece  in the Daily Telegraph  proving that the average middle class family in London needs £100,000 pa.  Biggest expenses he cited were: mortgage £10K pa, school fees £15K pa (the one non negotiable for membership of middle class London) childcare £10K pa,  food £6K pa  and two cars £5K pa. I actually did not think  he was being too over the top. If anything  he was being wildly optimistic thinking that a middle class couple with social networks to keep shiny would  spend only £2000 on entertaining, and  restaurants. He finally estimated that earning £100,000 before tax, they would be going bust at the rate of £10K a year. This seemed terribly upbeat. More like £20K I thought. The article was stressful just reading it, so I was unsurprised when he pointed out that middle class London  couples have an above average  divorce rate.

 It was  doing such inescapable and mind-boggling sums that lured my husband and I back to Scotland. Hurrah we thought, a cohesive society where everyone attends the local school, where there is thrift and economy and a cheering conviction that public service matter, heavenly  bliss after skeletal Thatcherite public services we had endured down south.

Of course we were terribly naive, and soon  found that  the middle classes up here were alive and spending  bigtime too. And though salaries still tend to be lower, as Edinburgh  grows in power at a capital,  I am expecting an article any day in the Edinburgh Evening News on surviving  Auld Reekie on £100K. I already know stressed-out couples juggling two cars,  credit cards, several sets of  George Watson fees plus houses they had to bid £40K+ over the asking price to secure. Traditionally too  the pressure on private schools in Edinburgh and Glasgow  has always been every bit as fanatical as London, though with lower fees and perhaps less cause.  But as in London, I notice  a growing dislocation between the private sector middle class who often did not go to private school themselves but who are now bankcrupting themselves over school fees, and the public and voluntary sector middle class professionals who  often were privately educated themselves but now can't afford it for their own kids. Middle class tensions are at their rawest and most painful at the school gates. Spending a  Saturday evening driving round  looking at property,  Morningside now strikes me as a sky-high London suburb. Every patch has  some development being spat up for prices among the fastest rising in the UK. The heat in the market rises off the pavement London-style.

Oh dear, where will it end? For the poor old  middle classes there is guilt on one hand, debt on the other. Historically, fear of life without a safety net weighs heavily on Scottish families, in many of whom lurk tales of social downward mobility during wars and depression. Middle class membership therefore comes too dearly fought for. Yet what too often we fail to recognise is that this greasy pole of consumerist middle class achievement is purely imaginary,  a  virtual totem quite different from the tangible power of the Establishment. It is all in our minds. We are not actually going anywhere. We remain the class we are, however high our professional ladder.

So I have no easy answers to the curse of being middle class if you want to live within your means and save for the future. Except  pick one or two middle class badges of honour you cannot live without and opt out of everything  else. Never, ever  refer to being broke, but choose your friends with care, drop the big spenders for they are not good for you and  cultivate blindness to their   cars, houses, holidays, private healthcare, clothes, restaurant habits, love of opera, etc. This is particularly difficult to do  in a bubbling economy,  for middle class animals are innately competitive, but you can do it! Your children will still love you, and your kitchen can look perfectly decent  without a banana hammock!  And if recession comes, big spending will suddenly be out  and you'll look frightfully refined.

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 16 May, 1999 •

Degrees of Separation ... get connected!

Some years ago I went to London’s Royal Court Theatre to see Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare’s masterly play which suggested that each of us are only separated from everyone else on the planet by just six degrees. It spawned a favourite London dinner party game. Pick a celebrity and see how many degrees of connection separate you. As I had a successful Hollywood character actor for a stepfather I beat everyone hands down. You name it, Monroe, Reagan, Minelli, Crosby, he had known them all. Very popular making at the time. Not!

As we try and make sense of where we are in the economic cycle, we must sometimes remind ourselves just how few degrees do separate us from the rest of the human race. Difficult sometimes , for we naturally prefer to see ourselves slightly apart from the pack. So news last week, that insurance giant Axa is to cut 2000 jobs, closing centres from Kendall to Exeter may not have excited much interest here, we have our own problems not least in the Borders, but play the game and somehow you find we are connected to that story. More depressing, given Scotland’s umbilical attachment to Marks & Sparks would have been news of 290 jobs losses among senior store managers. So we would have emoted for ten seconds before learning that the multi-million pound fortunes of those lucky partners in Goldman Sachs saw shares immediately leap to a 40% premium. In the musical chairs of economic news all connects. Thinking about it, I found I knew someone who knew a Goldman Sachs vice president, someone else whose mother knew a Marks & Sparks manager ‘moving on’ and yes an Axa Manager via a colleague. Less glamorous than connections with Monroe perhaps, but in terms of economic confidence, more important.

In Scotland we cannot but be affected by such news both good and bad, for our economic base remains narrow. The golden Goldman Sachs employees could buy a New Town house or invest in Scottish companies, their wealth cascading a drop or two north of the border, but all those Axa and M & S families who might have headed for the Highlands will stay home. Some may live in Scotland and effects of their redundancy will ripple out. Incoming tourism will be further affected this year as results of other redundancies which did not make the news, in the retail, technology, legal and financial sectors. ‘ Down in England’ economic news also affects us more personally. In the smallest hamlet in Wester Ross or the busiest Glasgow pub you will find people with children and siblings working in the service economy in Essex, Bristol or Potters Bar. For whatever our race and history, on a small island there are no degrees of separation. As Katie Grant wrote in the Herald last week, all that pre-election talk of divorce was twaddle. The English and Scots are not married, we are much closer than that.

Yet watching the evening news about Kosovo in recent weeks has given me a curious feeling of unconnectedness, for it has apparently had no effect on the markets. News stories from Kosovo and Wall Street have resembled those mathematical problems so often parodied in school magazines. ‘If Johnny has three apples, and Jenny has two, what ‘s the weather like in Newcastle.’ Belgrade is bombed to bits but how long did it take the Dow to reach 11,000? It seems like a couple of days since new traders were cheering clearing 10,000. The FTSE too has been happily bubbling along, and with the IMF announcing on cue that the world crisis was over, Clinton has been able to continue the caring ole’ boy act, and blah-blah-Blair could carry on saving humanity.

Then the Chinese embassy bomb changed the world. Suddenly Blair looks like a plonker and Clinton is not having his calls returned. The markets momentarily lost their nerve, but with all those baby boomers shovelling money into stocks, nerves were steadied. Buffett warned disciples that the markets were too high, but all those white collar whizz kids dealing on-line answered, what do you you know, creep? Yet isn’t it time we plebs start making connections, for we’re the ones who usually have to pay? Politics and economics cannot play indefinitely that other fantasy game of having no connection with the firm next door.

So what next? The Americans, who now strike many as being as arrogant as they are ignorant, carry on spending on the back of their market investments regardless, apparently as far up above the fray as their bombers, but perhaps they cannot distinguish the realities of the landscape either. Yet as Andrew Smithers observed in the Evening Standard last week, Wall Street is more overvalued now than it was even at its 1929 peak. "There is a mass of evidence that we are in the midst of the fifth Wall Street mania this century. On each previous occasion the result has been crash followed by major recession. It is possible that the world has changed, ... but it must make sense to have contingency plans in case it turns out all wrong."

Now of course we heard it all that before last summer didn’t we? And as we watch the news, we may still decide there are sixty degrees of separation not six between our lives and Wall Street , let alone Kosovo. We’re O.K. Except the first Kosovans are arriving in Scotland and soon I bet we will know someone who knows someone whose child has a Kosovan in their class and a Wall Street downswing would connect with us horribly fast . It would even put the Goldman Sachs boys off their golf.

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 9 May, 1999 •

Cathedrals of Convenience ... try free thought!

News last week that Sainsbury’s has lost a whole percentage point of market share to 19% in the first three months of 1999, helped by that ghastly hectoring ad campaign by dear old John Cleese occurs amid the current Government investigations into claims that supermarkets’ margins are too high. Unless we happen to be shareholders, most of us I suspect will be rather pleased that Sainsburys’, such a symbol of eighties Thatcherite excess, is suffering. For it has become somehow fashionable to knock supermarkets as if we suspect they both manipulate and exploit us. Such ingratitude and inconsistency ! Our wallets are filled with their loyalty cards and our cupboards groan unnecessarily with their 2 for 1 special offers and as we can avoid anything but temptation, we are bound to them body and soul. But like the Church in Victorian times they seem all-powerful, inescapable institutions and so even though our faith in them is absolute, we love to kick out against them.

I have in fact long suspected that supermarkets are our new religion. Look at those pointy spires on supermarket buildings, and the people streaming in each Sunday, while real churches struggle for good attendance figures. What a winning creed supermarkets offer! No wonder the Church of Scotland periodically rails against such competition. And though we aisle fodder are now wise to supermarkets’ little tricks such as the ersatz incense of baking bread, their triple points offered on things we don’t need, and that most blatant symbol of conversion, loyalty cards delivering a promised land of ISAs and the Internet, yet we remain in thrall. For we believe they save us time and money, commodities more precious these days than our souls. And like all effective church services, they provide an experience which appeals to all the senses and makes us feel loved.

Asda is particularly good at this. On a visit to their Edinburgh A1 branch before Christmas, I detected a positive charismatically evangelical cunnning about their choice of music playing over the loudspeakers. That old James Bond number ‘Nobody Does it better’ sang out amid the joyless throng of exhausted thirty and forty somethings wheeling late life toddlers down the aisles. The song obviously rekindled memories of past romance, of smooching at parties in student flats. A musak hymn to that sweet bird of youth, long since swallowed up by fish fingers. I then witnessed a positive stampede to the sparkling wine as the target market decided that, sod it, there was still life in her yet. Nice one Asda. Bigger margins there than on the kiddy meals.

Allan Breese of Taylor Nelson Sofres Superpanel Unit which tracks 10,000 households tells me that the average supermarket shopper is nowadays not merely buying what is on a shopping list but is searching for ‘meal solutions’. How spiritual. "The housewife goes in knowing she must feed her family five times and therefore looks for solutions she can easily prepare. Hence the huge rise in ethnic pre-prepared meals." Interestingly he finds that this huge rise in the popularity of ready meals mirrors our soaring fascination for cookery programmes, as if we are now becoming a nations of cooks in theory. Gardening too is the other marvelous theoretical activity supermarkets offer. My local Safeway currently has such fun terra-cotta pots spewed all over their entrance. You could buy a dozen with some ready-made ‘gardening solutions’, shrubs to you and me, and forget about the garden together. Hallelujah!

Clive Vaughan, Head of Consulting at Retail Intelligence remains however one of the true faith. For the leading supermarkets he suggests have some of the best management teams in the UK, and Sainsburys will regroup and bounce back. Not to mention that other leading British sect M&S. I ask him about the Government’s inquisition on overpricing and he stoutly defends the sector. American margins are too low, and European retailers are mostly privately owned and do not reveal the figures. Plus did I know that it costs £15 - 20m to develop a site? "The return on capital in the UK is less than their European counterpart. "He is scornful of the suggestion that home delivery and buying over the Internet will ever catch on to any large extent. If customers are too busy to shop, they will hardly be around for ‘delivery windows’ (I love the jargon). No, the future is bigger stores, with a greater selections of merchandise. Supermarket cathedrals in fact

Confession Time. I am a heretic. For in the past few months I have almost stopped shopping in supermarkets altogether. I save probably £100 a month on food bills for I am tempted no more by impulse buys, remaining wickedly in control of both senses and emotions. Just as the spiritual Japanese warehouse components, I am now a disciple of the new creed of JIT. Just In Time. Loo rolls and baked beans no longer eat up my cashflow or personal space for I only buy what I need each day. Less is more. I am a supermarket excommunicado, cast into the outer darkness of my local high street shops. I can barely describe the feeling of relief. For now let me tell you, my brothers and sisters, I have found a Heaven on earth. There is life after Tesco. Join me!

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 2 May, 1999 •

The Skipton Seminar ... Danish Pastries

It was an enticing invitation from Skipton Financial Services, inviting me to a finance seminar at the local posh hotel. I rattled the local grapevine and discovered that Skipton did this periodically and if you sat through the talk, you received free Danish pastries, a pen, real coffee and a nice view of the golf course. The invitation was sent to my respectable married persona who for convenience has accounts in places like the Skipton, rather than to my personal finance writing alter ego who thinks their interest rates are rubbish, and thus it was the married me, who last Friday morning, donned a sensible Jaeger skirt and went along. "Hi ya folks!" said our presenter. He was a plump, friendly forty-something geordie called Ian, who had obviously done this routine hundreds of times but was trying to be spontaneous which was why he had removed his jacket. Alas my neighbourhood is far too posh for such hi-de-hi familiarity, so the audience, composed of about forty people with an average age of 65, muttered good morning discouragingly. Skipton Financial Services, Ian explained, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Skipton Building Society and governed by the PIA. "And that folks, is not the Pakistan International Airlines!" Silence. Oh dear, the English sense of humour doesn’t travel well. This was when Ian, the poor wee soul, finally realised he had his work cut out

What Is Your Money For? The sentence appeared on the screen. 'For a rainy day' someone said, everyone nodded. Having run personal finance seminars myself, I know how hard it is to strike the right tone. Too chummy and simplistic and you alienate the personal finance groupies who like to go to bed with an annual report. Too much about equity bond ratios, and you see the eyes of people who usually line their rabbit’s cage with the money pages glazing over. But Ian did his best. First we learned all about the intricacies of Long Term Care Insurance. "Absurdly cheap" he said carefully choosing the nicely Scottish example of Scottish Amicable. "If Mr. and Mrs. Senior invested £10,000 at the age of 60, Mr. Senior would get £19,000 and Mrs. Senior £17,000 pa for life on the other’s death !" There were ooos of appreciation. "And why does Mrs. Senior get less than her hubby?" asked Ian. "Because we live longer!" announced a glamorous seventy-something lady wearing golfball sized pearls. Looking around I realised that the men had a decidedly hunted expression.

Money like housekeeping, Ian explained, should be for the pantry, fridge or freezer. The pantry means instant access such as building society accounts, the fridge is for investment for 1 - 3 years such as National Savings and Guaranteed with profit Bonds and the freezer is for long term investments like pensions and etc. The intricacies of Isas were explained with graphics and arrows, and for five minutes made perfect sense.

By now tummies were rumbling so to keep our minds off the Danish pastries, Ian turned into Bruce Forsyth and was playing his cards right. "If you put £10,000 into the Halifax in 1984 would it be worth £8,000, £12,000?" he called. Throwing all middle class pretensions aside we were soon shouting Lower! Higher! like old pros. One gentleman who was simultaneously doing the Telegraph crossword correctly guessed that if you had put £10K into the Halifax in 1984 it would be worth £26K now compared to £98K in the stockmarket. Ian looked relieved.

"So. Are You Adventurous, Balanced or Cautious!" Ian enquired. We decided we were all frightfully well balanced and now knew the importance of not having too many eggs in the one basket – though lots in the pantry, the fridge and the freezer. Then we were whisked through Inheritance Planning, "You don’t want to give money away to your children and grandchildren if you might need it yourself, do you?" said Ian. "No!" cried the by now thoroughly warmed-up audience. For we were holding on to our purse strings with renewed vigour. No one would ever get fourpence out of us again.(Except Skipton Financial Services). Then suddenly Ian was taking in the applause and we were racing each other down the carpeted corridor for sustenance.

It did me good to be in spend a morning with this age group. The fastest growing sector of the population is the over 85s and yet perhaps because personal finance pages are usually written by people of working age, so the wishes and aspirations of the retired are too often ignored. Of course mortgage payers are savers too, but there is now a vast generation gap between the highly geared younger generation and the high-value, asset-owning older generation which has taken full advantage of the post-war bull market. Neither generation has much time for each other’s viewpoint, for both feel insecure for different reasons and thinks the other does not know the meaning of suffering. Munching Danish pastries, my group looked tanned and relaxed and sat discussing their next holiday. It is they, I realised, who shall inherit the earth, for they have invested in time rather than timing, in thrift rather than debt, and small squirrelings rather than the big investment gestures. Theirs is the silent laughing victory you will not see reported in the papers for it is undramatic and unsexy. But never doubt its force. My generation, who is killing itself with stress, sky-high childcare costs and mega-mortgages should know when it is beaten.

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 25 April, 1999 •

London ...

Absurdly it has been six months since I have been in London, so the capital strikes me afresh like a stranger. I leap onto the Underground and know my way round every street but now I find I view London through Scottish eyes. On the journey down I read Simon Heffer’s new book. Nor Shall My Sword, in which he argues that England would be well shot of Scotland, implying that Independence would leave us facing a poverty stricken financial fate while the English would be rich and happy. I wondered whether this was part of the much hyped English backlash? I need not have worried. My friends greet me warmly; they still think I’m mad to have left London but order champagne. Is that Zoë Ball sitting over there? As the bubbles go up my nose I remember that yes, this is the London I like best. In small and preferably liquid quantities.

Famous faces are a fun part of London life. I go to David Mellor, no not the energetic football strip boy with a weakness for my namesakes, but the upmarket Sloane Square kitchen supplier. and see Andrew Lloyd Webber and his glamorous wife rifling through the oddments. They cultivate the careful middle distance celebrity gaze while apparently looking for a cheap champagne stopper. In order, as Lord L. W. tells the assistant, to make champagne last two days. Don’t cry for me Argentina I think, times must be hard. Then I read in the FT that he is taking back full control of RUG by buying back a 30% stake from Seagram. A careful man clearly looking after the baubees.

Just as well, for London eats money. Whereas in Scotland you can start the day with a tenner and end it with four pounds left, here I find myself at the cash machine twice a day with nothing to show for it. The cheapest luxury in London remains The London Evening Standard, which, along with stucco buildings and Lebanese food, is what I still miss most. On arrival I immediately buy a copy. Hot news from the Government Office for London reveal that the capital is booming, with Londoners spending an average of £700 a year in restaurants. It is also increasingly a young capital with people in the 20 - 44 bracket making up 41% of the population (compared with the 36% of the rest of the UK) attracted by the 14 Universities, the nightlife and the jobs.

I walk along the Kings Road at lunchtime and evidence of young London eating out is before me. Girls seem to be able to take alcohol far better than I ever managed in my twenties. But so much of this lifestyle is riding on debt and bankruptcy among the young no longer stigmatised. I overhear one girl telling a friend that although she has no money for food for the rest of the day, but that she and the office have just got through £300 worth of champagne. Courtesy of the boss. How nutritious.

I walk through Notting Hill, setting of the new movie starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. It does seem odd that Hugh Grant’s character who runs a failing travel bookshop, should live in a stucco house which would now be worth £2m. Even stranger, when one considers that he is playing a divorcee; an asset like that would have been soon sold to pay off the ex. I suspect the film reflects an earlier time in Notting Hill, when I used to live there, and where I got married – a raffish multi-cultural kaleidoscope where the rich rubbed shoulders with everyone else over the fresh beef tomatoes at Portobello market. Then £30K bought you a 2 bedroom flat. I determine not to sigh over property prices for the rest of my stay. For notional house values only mean big money if you want to move to a cheaper part of the country.

I meet editors and publishers and am deliciously wined and dined on mussels and chips, Belgian style. The ultra-cool restaurant is full, naturally, of young people smoking and drinking. My publisher asks me if I have written about the terrible plight of women, the fact that salaries do not reflect the cost of looking good. Make up, clothes, and good haircuts all cost money and yet this is not seen as requiring any sort of weighting allowance. I sympathise remembering my £40 monthly dry cleaning bills when I worked in London.

As the bull market continues to roar, London gives the impression of rampant overheating. If you’ve got it, flaunt it, (or do it even if you haven’t). Walk down Bond Street and just watch those Prada babes shine. But the trouble is that now we see a brutal dividing of the south-east middle classes as some people earn huge sums in the City, while others go bust keeping up appearances. I meet more friends over dinner and asking after mutual friends, learn that one has just sold his business for £20m while another has had her home, cheques and chequecard taken away and is sleeping in the office.

Finally I am taken to the American Bar at the Savoy before being poured back on the train. "Don’t you ever think of coming back ?" my companion asks. "Sometimes," I say, not to hurt his feelings. For there is nothing to beat London sophistication and I do love Londoners’ sense of humour. Yet I find myself facing King’s Cross with equanimity; for me solvency and sanity start north of the border.

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 18 April, 1999 •

Student Fees ...

Last week I went to a twenty-first birthday party. This was initially unnerving for, as with weddings, you find yourself remembering your own bash. Dim birthday memories returned of a night singing with a jazz trio at Edinburgh’s old Calton Studios with half Eng. Lit. 3 crowding round the bar and me up on stage belting out 'If They Could See Me Now'. Which given the crush they probably couldn’t. Happy days. Yet last week as the wine flowed, it was the guests of my generation who turned into giggly irresponsible teenagers, while the students remained soberingly mature and wanted to talk to me seriously about personal finance. On Saturday night!

A curious apartheid which exists between students and the rest of the population. Unless you are one yourself, or have student children, or you are a University employee, the student community remains an enigma. We read about grant changes but tend to see students through the prism of our own pampered studenthood which is now outdated and irrelevant. Their image in the press too as whinging, bolshie victims is unfortunate. This isn’t fair, but it is as if we cannot forgive them their lack of joie de vivre. For if life is bad for them, when they have youth and beauty , what must it be like for us?

Last week, Scotland’s students returned for the summer term. Just six weeks to go before exams bite and then summer holidays begin when they must find work to pare down the overdraft. Next year’s intake will not be so lucky, they will have no grant and will have to take loans through The Student Loans Company of up to £2800 p.a. plus bank overdrafts and part time jobs. The average debt, so my students friends tell me, is currently £10K by graduation, but they expect this to rise with the future intakes to £12K - £15K. I cannot imagine what such a burden must be like at their age.

The student loans are very reasonable. If you earn £12K you repay £15 a month £17K it is £52 a month but students rightly argue that the loans should be bigger to keep them from getting into debt with banks and credit card companies and having to working during term time when they should be studying. An NUS survey earlier this year revealed that 42% of students work during the term-time and that over 50% have consider giving up their course through money worries. Hardship seems to be a word attached to the student state like a manacle.

I ask my twenty-one year old birthday boy what are the side effects of all this financial pressure. He replies that it is making many students socially inept, for they either stay in their room to save money or else work. This seems wretched. For at the University networking, making friendships and joining clubs is, let's face it, as important as the studying. But now all this is apparently seen as a bit of a luxury.

Perhaps students today have different expectations? Wander round the Edinburgh University area and you see them talking into mobiles. They also have pagers and are online. Their feelings of insecurity are also perhaps exacerbated through the rapid financial changes they have experienced. UK students have traditionally been public sector animals used to public sector pay unlike their American counterparts who have always had a private sector mindset. Ours have been given TOO little time to adapt, like their parents who suddenly had to stump up for tuition fees. Signs are however that UK students are discovering U.S. chutzpah. The Student Employment Service at Edinburgh University now has 1000 student visitors a week at peak times looking for jobs ranging from bar work to website design. Students are also setting themselves up as freelances, having business cards printed and hustling.

I ring round a few student office bearers in Stirling, St. Andrews and Edinburgh and ask what personal finance training they are given. They mention booklets from banks, but seem amazed when I suggest mandatory classes in money management for every fresher, with refresher classes for the second and third years when the social life really takes off and spending pressures increase. I mention a couple of books every student should read. How To Feed Your Family for £5 a Day (Thorsons) and The Penny Pincher’s Book (Souvenir Press). Both were published some time ago but Students Associations could order bulk reprints from the publishers at a discount and prevent a lot want and worry.

How proactive and disciplined students have to be about money, for they simply cannot afford to be made victims by poverty. University can be an enormous drain on youthful energy, eating up time which might be better spent in the job market while studying more flexibly, so if young people do commit to full-time study, they must forget about past largesse and make a business plan with a degree priced as an investment. There is never any point spending creative energy worrying about money. If you are going up to University next year, then borrow or work just enough to live reasonably but budget like a Scrooge, and make sure you network like crazy and squeeze out every drop of added value your University can offer. Otherwise please don’t bother, for good jobs go to positive thinkers and youth is too short to be a sad student.

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson

• Sunday, 11 April, 1999 •

Coaching ...

We live in an age where very nice pickings can be made instructing the rest of us how to live. Trainers, counsellors, therapists, advisers of all disciplines plus assorted gurus of varying spiritual persuasions can take us in hand (for a fee) and using plain common sense show us the true way to effectiveness and achieving our goals. Do we lack the self-confidence of our forebears, who knows? Yet in a secular age, we continue the spirit of the confessional, but now it is our inadequacies rather than our sins which are explored and expiated. And sharing our fears and failures we feel so much better! It is probably the only time when we write largish cheques gladly. That is its genius, as the Church discovered very early on.

Now there is a new profession to help us go forth and prosper. Coaching. No, not the cramming for exams sort of coaching so many of us experienced as teenagers, but Coaching with a capital C which helps us establish goals and score them! I confess I need one. What a relief. Group hug.

Coach University founded in the US in 1992 has had 1000 pupils through its tele-classes and written materials of which, in the UK, 200 have paid the £1800 fee. The 36 modules are billed as ‘the management degree of the future’ and are studied through tele-conferencing. It is interesting to see a new profession establishing itself, and in the Internet age this seems much easier, for the website on coachu.com is impressive. I learn that Coaches help people and businesses to ‘set better goals and reach them,’ that they ask clients to focus better and produce results and provide clients with tools, support and structure to achieve more. ‘They hold you accountable for your life!' How unnerving.

Now if I work at it, I too could become a coach earning between $50,000 - $100,000 p.a. even though 50% of registered coaches have dayjobs. I begin to wonder if I too could coach, for journalists are very good at telling people how to run their lives. Coaches include career counsellors, actors, entrepreneurs and educators. Coaching is available in a huge numbers of areas, but I tap in ‘personal finance’ and thinking of my monthly phone bill which is already hitting three figures, restrict myself to the UK.

Aberdeen IFA Fiona Sutherland has a dayjob with Moray Firth Financial Services, but coaches in the evening. As she is still training, her fee is just £20 per session. "I have always thought being an IFA is part-psychologist and so coaching comes naturally. People come to me often because they do not have enough money and want to know why, or because they somehow do not value money and so spend frivolously. As we establish structures to help them understand their habits, often it becomes clear that the spending patterns come through a lack of self-love, and that people allow themselves to be bound up in chains of energy and emotion which stop them from moving on. Sometimes I start off advising on a client’s business life, only to find the problems seep into their personal and emotional life as well."

Clients are coached for a 3 - 6 month period, talking over the phone perhaps once a week. They are expected to do homework and prepare for each session. Testimonials from satisfied clients appear on the coachu.com website. You have changed my life being the general drift. I wonder if this is not a form of one-to-one Weight Watchers, for you would be far too embarrassed to phone up for your next in-depth session without having sorted yourself out.

Guildford based Barbara Edwards, an economist with an Oxbridge background, is an experienced coach with 8 clients paying £150 per month for a weekly half hour session over the phone. They number PR consultants and publishers whose financial concerns include Imelda Marcos shoe buying habits and multiple credit card debts. She in turn has a mentor coach in California, a pastor, who peps her up. Coaching has proved a flexible profession which can be fitted into her family commitments and she talks comfortingly in terms of establishing values and balance in your life.

Both women are hugely simpatico and successful and I could confess my every financial inadequacy to them quite happily. Other Coaches I speak to however seem less impressive and I wonder whether coaching, like the other advisory professions, is liable to attract professional failures in denial. A case of if you can’t hack it, advise. This does not mean they would be ineffective, but as potential clients we must develop a nose to suss them out and ask sticky questions about their c.v. before we pay up and join in. I think of the London IFA with a high flying City clientele who admitted she had eight credit cards and was running her business with a loan secured on her home. Eek. Or the never made it lawyer/businessman who became a priest for the free housing, or the neurotic mother who became a psychotherapist. But judge not lest ye be judged. I hastily add of course that journalists are no better, heard the one about the financial journalist who kept his money in a sock under the bed?

www.foraid.demon.co.uk/antonia_swinson