Understanding Living Longer

Tag Archives: life planning

A gift worth having….

When Bismark created the world’s first state pension scheme in the 1880s he never expected to pay out – it was simply a creative (and seemingly popular) tax raising exercise. Life expectancy in Germany at the time was 48, so 65 was selected for benefit payments to start, thus ensuring there were few, if any, […]

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Disruptive technology

When something comes along that sends an established market into turmoil it is usually described as a ‘disruptive technology’. Recently I have spotted at least two such changes. When EML started I saw a friend had a home office printer/copier/scanner which looked ideal – and so it proved, but with one big drawback. The unit […]

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The acid test…

When reviewing your possessions – try this. Ask your close family what they would do with ‘your stuff’ if you were hit by the proverbial bus? Most likely their response will fall into one of a number of categories: – Items of value to be sold (house, car etc) – Items of personal value but […]

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Taxing the dead….

When the chancellor found a hole in his balance sheet he took the easy option and turned to taxing the dead. Inheritance tax thresholds have already been frozen for over a decade – progressively dragging more people into the net and increasing the tax raised. However Covid needed a faster solution so the chancellor looked […]

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All stop…

Visiting an elderly relative at their care home I was greeted by staff at the door – fully masked and gloved – saying that their outbreak of Covid was getting worse. I decided to go in, say hello and just carry out the essential work I had come to do. Having donned mask and gloves […]

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A picture tells….

If the old saying is that ‘a picture can tell 1000 words’ – just imagine what a collage can do! One of my long term clients found that with each successive year he is embracing new experiences while continuing with the things he loves. Looking to illustrate the huge variety of these many activities I […]

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Making your own luck…

Have you ever thought ‘why do all the good things happen to them? – they are so lucky’?! The chances are they don’t feel quite to same way about their own ‘luck’. What they have learnt through experience is sometimes called to Rule of Large Numbers. Simply put, if you keep doing enough things, some […]

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The time is right…

Yesterday we said farewell to a colleague who started with me 25 years ago. For them the time was right. Management did a nice presentation at the start of the day and her friends and colleagues put on a wonderful informal lunch. Inevitably the conversation turned to the parallel subjects of Why now? and What […]

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Taking your own advice….

When coaching others, I use an analogy of the decks of an old galleon where the lowest deck was called an orlop while the captain spent his time up on the bridge. In truth, when charting our way through life we all spend time on every deck – sometimes doing the reassuringly mundane chores of […]

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We’re only just getting started…!

For the first time in nearly 40 years there are no desktop computers in use at home, and, come to think of it, apart from an old TV recorder, there are no disc drives either. In parallel, along with much of the country, we are about to switch over from those two tiny copper wires […]

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