NOEL WHITTAKER
Australia’s most trusted nance writer
Retirement made
Retirement made simple
Everything you need to know
By the same author:
MAKING MONEY MADE SIMPLE
MORE MONEY WITH NOEL WHITTAKER GETTING IT TOGETHER
GOLDEN RULES OF WEALTH
LIVING WELL IN RETIREMENT
CONTROLLING YOUR CREDIT CARDS SHARES MADE SIMPLE
SUPERANNUATION MADE SIMPLE
LOANS MADE SIMPLE
MONEY TIPS
25 YEARS OF WHITT & WISDOM
WILLS, DEATH & TAXES MADE SIMPLE
Co-authored with Rachel Lane:
DRIVING SMALL BUSINESS
BORROWING TO INVEST
SUPERANNUATION MADE EASY
BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO WEALTH
10 SIMPLE STEPS TO FINANCIAL FREEDOM
Co-authored with Julia Hartman: AGED CARE, WHO CARES?
SAVING TAX ON YOUR INVESTMENT PROPERTY RETIREMENT LIVING HANDBOOK
WINNING PROPERTY TAX STRATEGIES
DOWNSIZING MADE SIMPLE
RETIREMENT MADE SIMPLE
First published in Australia in 2020 by Noel Whittaker Holdings Pty Ltd
Reprinted December 2020
Reprinted February 2021
Reprinted April 2021
Reprinted July 2021
Second Edition August 2022
Reprinted January 2023
Third Edition August 2023
Reprinted February 2024
Fourth Edition October 2024
Visit our website at www.noelwhittaker.com.au
© Noel Whittaker Holdings Pty Ltd 2024
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-7636061-5-9 (PDF eBook)
Editing by Helena Bond
Cover design & typesetting by Sharon Felschow, dta studio
Front cover photograph by AJ Moller
Cartoons by Paul Lennon
The laws relating to superannuation, taxation, social security benefits, and the investment and handling of money are constantly changing and are often subject to departmental discretion. While every care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the material contained herein at the time of publication, neither the author nor the publisher will bear responsibility or liability for any action taken by any person, persons or organisation on the purported basis of information contained herein.
Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, no person, persons or organisation should invest monies or take other action on reliance of the material contained herein, but instead should satisfy themselves independently (whether by expert advice or otherwise) of the appropriateness of any such action.
About the author
International bestselling author, finance and investment expert, radio broadcaster, newspaper columnist, and public speaker, Noel Whittaker is one of the world’s foremost authorities on personal finance.
Noel reaches over four million readers each week through his columns in major Australian newspapers in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, and Brisbane. He is a contributor to various magazines and websites, and appears regularly on radio and television.
Noel is one of Australia’s most successful authors, with 22 bestselling books achieving worldwide sales of more than two million copies. His first book, Making Money Made Simple, set Australian sales records and was named in the 100 Most Influential Books of the Twentieth Century.
For 30 years, Noel was a Director of Whittaker Macnaught, one of Australia’s leading financial advisory companies, with more than two billion dollars under management. He relinquished all interests in that business in 2007.
In 2011 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for service to the community in raising awareness of personal finance.
Noel is now an Adjunct Professor with the Queensland University of Technology and a member of the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) consumer liaison committee.
Acknowledgements
Retirement is a massive topic, because it covers such a myriad of issues, many of which are uncertain. These include how long you will live, the behaviour of markets, and potential changes to the law. So this book has been a huge project. It could not have happened without great support.
I am indebted to my wife, Geraldine, for spending many hours with me debating the content; my long time editor Helena Bond, and to our good friends Terry Quinn, Tony Hinton, Steve Williams, Susan Nutting, Doug Tynan, David Orford, and Scott Hartley, who spent so much time reading and commenting on the manuscript; and to Stephanie Ryan at the Queensland State Library for help with research.
I also must thank the following experts for their generous input in their specialist areas: Brendan Stone, Brad Monk, Michael Patman, Geoff Whiddon, Rhiannon Kanoniuk, and Pippa Elliott on financial advice; Stuart Forsythe and Meg Heffron on superannuation; Ashley Owen on investing in shares; Margaret Lomas on property; Julia Hartman on tax; Tony Phillips on binding financial agreements; and Brian Herd on Estate Planning.
Special thanks to Sharon Felschow, who has been typesetting my books for 20 years; Paul Lennon, who has done a great job on the cartoons as always; and McPhersons, who have taken care of the printing as usual.
Thank you all for being on the team.
INTRODUCTION
Thinking about retiring in the next 30 years? You are part of a quickly growing group. In 2019 there were 3.9 million retirees, with another 500,000 planning to retire in the next five years. And retirees are the fastest growing group in the country. In the 20 years ending 2031, the over-65s are expected to increase by 85% to 5.7 million and the over-75s by 101% to 2.8 million people.
A major factor that influences people’s decision to retire is financial security, but the sad reality is that the majority of retirees rely heavily on income from the government. And women do it much harder than men. About 30% of retirees with no personal income are women — only 7% are men. And while 36% of retired women rely on their partner’s income to meet their retirement living costs, just 7% of retired men do.
To make matters worse, increasing life expectancies mean growing pressure on the welfare budget, which is already strained by the massive blow caused to government budgets everywhere by the impacts of the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s a double whammy for both the employed and the retired. The pressure to restrict access to age pensions is increasing as the numbers of over-65s increase. Yet those in the workforce are faced with trying to build funds for their
Retirement made simple own retirement at the same time as they are being called upon to support the growing number of aged people.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that accumulating wealth for retirement, and then keeping it secure after retirement, is still possible for those who make the effort to learn what to do. Better still, the recent discoveries concerning the ageing process are pointing the way to a long, healthy, and fulfilling life after 65. That’s why I call that period “the years of fulfilment.”
It could be a time of freedom — freedom from debt, freedom from tight deadlines, and freedom from the demands of children and the workplace. It should also be a time of discovery when you are free to explore the things you have dreamed about.
But it will be a time of challenges as well. Most retirees have only two sources of income — their own portfolio, usually in superannuation, and welfare. To get the returns you need for a long life, you need to invest in growth assets like
shares, which by their nature are volatile. This means you need to be able to handle the share market having a big fall now and then. Furthermore, the continual changes to superannuation and the age pension system require ongoing vigilance. To this heady mix add estate planning, issues that can come with ageing parents, and ageing yourself.
I have been investing in shares for 60 years, spent 30 years as co-owner of a large financial advisory business, and am now on the board of an ASX-listed company based in Sydney, which manages funds of over $600 million for a wide range of shareholders. I’m also a member of the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) Liaison committee, which meets regularly with ASIC senior executives to discuss matters of importance in the financial services sector. In addition, I have spent the last 20 years chasing and reporting on scams and risky investments. And on top of that, my weekly columns, which I have been writing for major newspapers for more than 30 years, attract a daily flood of emails, which gives me a good grasp of the issues facing many Australians.
I’m not telling you this to big-note myself, but to give you confidence in what I have to say. I also want to let you know that even a person with my range of experience finds investing difficult. That’s right: between the economy constantly changing, laws being revised frequently, new products evolving, fraudsters continually thinking up new tricks, and surprises such as the GFC and COVID-19, even an old hand like myself finds it a challenge.
Retirement made simple
In this book I will share with you some of the many experiences I have had as a financial adviser and an investor, as well as the input I get from all the emails that arrive in response to my newspaper columns. Hopefully, this material will help you avoid many of the major hazards which lie in wait for the uninitiated. We all need to help each other.
I have taken a holistic approach, covering retirement from the psychological angle as well as the financial one. The contents include ways to be healthy in your mind and body, as well as in your pocket. I’ve been fortunate to have so much time and energy to devote to learning about these things, and I’d like to share what I’ve found with you.
The problem with reading a book on a complex issue like retirement is knowing where to start. To understand a topic like superannuation you should know about tax, but to understand tax you should know about superannuation. It’s like trying to eat a giant circular pie. To make it easier for you, I have divided the book into separate divisions so you can start at any topic that particularly interests you. However, the best way to approach it may be to read the whole book quickly from the start and then focus on the chapters that apply most to you.
The fact that you are reading this book shows you are serious about having a great time in retirement. Congratulations. Now join me as we plan your approach to “the years of fulfilment.”
NOEL WHITTAKER
INVESTING IN YOUR FUTURE
There are two ways to face the future. One way is with apprehension; the other is with anticipation. — Jim Rohn
Let’s walk together for a while on your journey along the road to retirement. I think journey is the perfect word, because it has connotations of a desired destination and all sorts of adventures along the way.
But, like all journeys, it requires some planning and preparation. You need to have the desire to take the journey, to know where you are starting from, what resources are available to you on the way, and the main challenges you may encounter as you travel. There will be obstacles and unexpected events. But if you plan for contingencies, persist, and think resourcefully, there is a high probability the journey will be a successful one.
Let’s start with desire. One of the key aims of this book is to help you arrive at your chosen retirement age with sufficient financial assets to live in the style you want, and ensure your money will last longer than you do. So the first step is to encourage that desire. Your dreams may not be all about you, either — many people have a strong desire to help their
Retirement made simple
children buy a home, and not keep them waiting until they are 60 to receive some of the family assets. But let’s face it, the more money you accumulate, the more choices you will have in your retirement years.
Unfortunately, there will always be some people who say things like, “Why would I scrimp and save for my retirement when all around me I see people who have never saved a dollar receiving more money from the age pension than I could get with half a million dollars in superannuation?”
At date of writing, that may be the case, but Australia is facing the same demographic changes as most of the developed world. It’s the perfect storm. People are living longer and longer, increasing pressure on welfare budgets. But governments everywhere are not living within their means: they are funding welfare by borrowing for it. The COVID-19 pandemic greatly exacerbated the situation, with trillions of dollars borrowed by governments all around the world in 2020 to
provide stimulus packages to prevent their economies going into depression. These are indicators for a bleak future: it’s likely that governments will be unable to keep up with their welfare bills.
I’ve seen a major change in attitude to the age pension in my lifetime. In 1984, when I started working in the financial advisory industry, everybody regarded the age pension as a right. Most people thought, “I have paid taxes all my life — now in my retirement, the government can take care of me.”
But the thinking has changed totally — the pension is now seen by governments and taxpayers as welfare. As a result, eligibility for the age pension is being tightened. For example, in January 2017, the cut-off point at which a single homeowner would not receive even one dollar of pension was slashed from $793,750 of assets to $542,500. At the date of writing, the family home was exempt, but most other assets — including superannuation, investments, furniture, and motor vehicles — are included in assessable assets. Now people think “Why should a couple who own a million-dollar home, and have more than $900,000 in other assets, be receiving welfare?”
I’ll discuss the age pension in more detail later, but the bottom line is that anyone who thinks they will be getting a generous age pension 20 years from now is kidding themselves.
Most government projections regarding life expectancies are conservative, because they are based on historical data. It is reasonable to expect, however, that medical breakthroughs in the next 40 years will add many years to forecasted life
Retirement made simple expectancies. Therefore, the predictions in the Intergenerational Reports may not be accurate, and health and welfare budgets will be under more pressure than has been forecast.
Access to welfare is continually being tightened.
It’s a gloomy prediction, but it’s hard to argue with it. Unless you have more faith than I do that governments will be able to solve these problems over the next four decades, you should be making every effort to accumulate generous funds for your retirement.
Australia seems to be moving inexorably to a society of haves and have-nots. Despite a lot of rhetoric from our politicians, it will be the haves who will be first in line for medical care as queues for free health services grow. At date of writing, in Queensland, the waiting list to go on the waiting list for a hip replacement was 463 days. That’s the waiting list to get on the waiting list! But if you have good private health insurance and money in the bank, you can usually get treatment quickly.
Remember, money comes from three basic sources: you working, your money working, and welfare. It therefore follows, if you wish to stop work at some stage, and you share my view that welfare will be continually tightened, that you should build up enough money for a comfortable retirement.
That may be a scary thought, but actually building wealth is simply a matter of following some basic principles. I’ll
discuss them in detail in the next chapters; I promise you they are not hard to understand. They will work for you, if you work on them. Your choice to do so makes you one of the lucky ones — most people have no interest in learning basic financial success principles, let alone putting them into practice, and as a result never build up the resources they could if they were better educated.
The area of retirement covers many facets, but understandably, the focus of many retirees and potential retirees is their finances. What will the world look like after COVID19? Which way will interest rates go? What will stock markets do? And of course: where is the best place to invest? Consequently, this book begins with a section on investing, then moves on to risks and scams before we look at how to design your own retirement. So, let’s start by explaining the maths of money.
The maths of money
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. —
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The maths of money revolves around compound interest. The concept is not hard to understand, but knowing about it could be worth literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to you. There is one huge message in this chapter — the amount you have in your portfolio when you retire will depend mainly on two things: the rate you can earn and the length of time the money has to grow.
For years, I’ve been using the riddle of the lily in the pond to demonstrate compounding.
QUESTION If a lily doubled in size every day, and it took ten days to go from a tiny speck to lling up an entire lagoon, how long would it take to go from occupying one quarter of the lagoon to lling it up?
ANSWER Two days. If it doubles every day it will take one day to go from quarter full to half full, and one more day to go from half full to full.
Notice how the rate at which it grows gets faster and faster as time goes by. The lily achieved 75% of its growth in the final 20% of the time.
If the lily leaves are the money needed for the time when you want to stop work, harvesting them on the eighth day would deprived you of 75% of what you could have had. This is why extending your working life, if that is possible, can turbocharge your superannuation.
Compounding is one of the most important financial concepts you will ever learn. Once you grasp the effects of time and rate — and put them to work for you — you are on the way to a fortune.
The principle of compound interest is that you do not withdraw earnings or growth from an investment, but add them to the principal. Thus, the interest becomes merged, or “compounded,” with the principal. For example, while you are working, your superannuation is compounding inside your fund, as you are not making any withdrawals from it. Usually, when you retire and start to draw a pension, the earnings are still compounding at a higher rate than the amount you are withdrawing. It’s the same if you invest in property
Retirement made simple — you cannot access the capital growth unless you sell the property, or borrow against it, so it compounds. In compounding, growth starts slowly but gets faster and faster as time passes. How quickly it speeds up is determined by the rate of return. Let’s look at an example.
EXAMPLE
Imagine you put $100,000 in an investment that achieved 6% growth and 4% income (10%), on average, each year. Provided you reinvested the income, the value of the investment would double every seven years. If instead you spent the income of 4%, the rate of growth would reduce to 6%. At that rate the money would double every 12 years. You can see how large a reduction this causes over time.
The point of this exercise is to demonstrate how compound interest works. Notice that the growth in years 14 to 21 for the reinvested income was $400,000, which was more than the entire growth in the previous 14 years.
At this early stage in the book, I want to introduce you to the calculators on my website www.noelwhittaker. com.au. I designed them myself to be very simple to use, and to give you access to most of the information I use myself every day.
COMPOUND INTEREST CALCULATOR
Pause for a moment and verify the numbers you have just read, that is, a 10% return with $0 further investment on an opening balance of $100,000. Then compare the numbers for a 6% return on $100,000, noticing that the balance at the end of year 21 is just $340,000. (Don’t be bamboozled by the exact figure — I’ve just rounded it up $43 to make it clearer.)
Figure 1: Compound interest calculator If the return had been 10% because of the extra 4% income, the balance at the end of 21 years would’ve been $800,000.
SUPER CONTRIBUTIONS CALCULATOR
Let’s calculate another example. The person is 45, earns $150,000 a year, and has $400,000 in superannuation. I am assuming a salary increase of 4% a year and the standard contribution and entry tax. If their fund returned just 5% per annum their balance at age 65 would be $1.78 million.
Now recalculate it using a 9% annual return. Notice that their balance at age 65 — after 20 years of compounding — would be $3.3 million. And now let’s throw time back into the equation. At 5% they would have $1.74 million, but working for just five more years would have increased that balance to $2.7 million. At 9%, the balance after just 25 years would be a whopping $5.4 million.
The maths affects you as an investor in two ways. If you are building money for retirement, a longer time frame and/ or a better rate of return means you don’t need to invest as
Figure 2: Super contributions calculator
much to reach your target — conversely, a longer time frame and/or a greater rate means the same amount invested each year will give you a much higher final balance then if you had a shorter time frame and achieved a lower rate of return.
Compound interest is slow to start its work but, like a rock rolling down a hill, it speeds up as time passes. Unfortunately, many people give up and don’t give it time to work.
Summing up
• The two major factors that affect how much you will have at the end of your investment period are the earning rate you can achieve, and the time available for the growth to happen.
• Over a long period, the rate of return has a huge effect on the final outcome.
• Compound growth starts slowly, but accelerates as time passes.
2 Investing 101
I made a resolution to let my money work instead of me!
— John D Rockefeller
If you are investing for retirement, or are already retired, knowing something about investing is critical. Unless you are getting a lifetime pension from a previous employer, the only income you will have after you stop work will come from your investments or from welfare.
You may have had a range of investment experiences. Some of you will be highly successful investors. Some will — like many of my friends — use a financial adviser with whom you’ve had a satisfactory relationship for years. Some of you will have a chequered investment history with wins and losses, and may be confused about how to make retirement successful. Some of you may never have invested at all. And, sadly, some of you will have suffered serious losses due to a wide range of issues.
My goal in this section is to explain the basics of investing and give you some simple rules that should stand you in good stead for the long haul.
But it’s not easy. The investment world is full of uncertainties, and investors are bombarded with a barrage of conflicting and often confusing information. In spite of all my years investing, advising, and investigating investments, I also find investing difficult. Things are constantly changing. To make matters worse, we are all victims of both inertia and our own personal biases. Many people I meet get really enthusiastic about starting an investment program, but they find the range of options overwhelming. They haven’t a clue where to start, and consequently don’t even get around to dipping their toes in the water. It’s a natural reaction. But understanding your own personal biases is critical if you are to be a successful investor. That’s why I’ve devoted the whole of Chapter 11 to it.
In this section, I explain the basics of investing, and share with you some of the information I have learnt over the last 60 years. Just be aware that investing is an art, not a science — there are some fundamentals, which you ignore at your peril, but there are also many uncertainties, such as the future of interest rates, inflation, and the behaviour of both share markets and property markets. This uncertainty will always be with us — but a greater level of understanding will help you make better choices.
Investment fundamentals
A good definition of investing would be “to allocate money for future use instead of spending it today.” Naturally, you would hope that it would still be there when you needed it,
Retirement made simple and that it would have increased in value to compensate you for the loss of purchasing power over time.
The first fundamental is that every investment decision has advantages and disadvantages. If you put your money in the bank, while it should never fall in value, the income from it may be relatively small, and there are no tax concessions on the interest. If you put your money in superannuation, you move it to a low tax area, but the price of doing that is loss of access until you reach your preservation age. If you invest in shares, you enjoy the advantage of being able to sell part of your holding quickly, and the income may be tax-free. However, its value could fall when the market does. If you invest in real estate, you face repairs, maintenance costs and vacancies, and have no ability to part-sell — but the advantage is that you would not expect to lose a huge chunk of your capital.
Make sure you understand the good points and the bad points of every investment decision you intend to make. Don’t invest until you understand them.
The next fundamental is that investments may produce income, or capital growth, or a combination of both. Some investments — like vacant land or gold — produce no income at all. That is challenging because, while income is often predictable, capital growth is only fairly predictable over the long term; it is unpredictable in the short term.
You may think that’s stating the obvious, but the average investor does not understand it. If the share market — or the property market — is steaming along, that seems like a signal to the uninitiated to jump in and grab a share of the action. They don’t realise that the capital growth they are so excited about won’t happen forever, most of it has already happened. And, as we saw with COVID-19, a market that is booming in January could have crashed by March. This is why investors are always told that past returns from an investment may not be indicative of future returns.
So, here’s the dilemma. An investor will be looking for the best returns they can achieve within their risk profile, and these will usually come from growth assets, that is, from capital gains, typically from property or from shares. And while we could reasonably expect that a combined growth/ income return from good property and share investments should average around 8% a year long term, the short term returns may be nothing like this. Hence, if you are investing in assets such as property and shares, where the bulk of
Retirement made simple the returns are expected to come from capital growth, you should have a minimum seven- to ten-year time frame in mind. This will give you time to get through the inevitable bad periods. And don’t forget, if you’re a retiree aged 65, you have a good chance of another 30 years of investing ahead of you.
Over the long term, the best returns should come from growth assets like property and shares.
I’m sure you know that the only returns that count are the ones you receive after tax, but remember that all returns are not taxed in the same way. Furthermore, the tax depends on whose name the investment is in.
There’s more. Income is usually taxed at your marginal tax rate; rents and bank interest, for example, offer no tax concessions, so you pay full tax on these. But tax can be greatly reduced if the income is from franked dividends, which often applies to Australian shares. Capital gains are particularly attractive, because these are not taxed until you dispose of the asset, which could be many years after acquisition — and provided you have owned the asset for over a year, you get a 50% discount on the tax payable. In the chapters on tax later in this book you will discover the importance of holding assets in ways that help to minimise the tax payable.
If you think about the above, it will be obvious that the purpose of the investment should have a major influence on
the type of investment you make. If you have sold your home and need to keep the money somewhere safe until the property you have contracted to buy off the plan is completed, the only option is a bank deposit. You can’t afford entry or exit costs, or the chance of your capital falling in value. It’s the same if you are contemplating a holiday in a year or so — the term is too short for anything but a bank deposit. But if you’re 50, and are building assets for a retirement in 15 years, you should look at growth assets to provide the returns you need.
The investment menu: cash, property, shares
Whenever I make a speech at a money seminar, I start by asking “Are you confused by the vast range of options that appear to be available?” Most of the people in the audience have spent the day wandering from booth to booth, and the response is invariably an overwhelming “Yes.” I then remind them that, despite all the changes to the rules and the plethora of investment products available, there are still only three asset classes where the bulk of their funds can be invested: cash or fixed-interest securities, property, and shares. In Making Money Made Simple I called it the “investment menu.”
And keep in mind that diversification — not having all your eggs in one basket — is a cornerstone of successful investing.
Once you understand the menu concept, you will appreciate why you have three major decisions when you are considering where to invest:
1. ASSET ALLOCATION What percentage of your total assets should you invest in each of the three asset classes — cash, property, and shares?
2. INVESTMENT VEHICLE Do you invest in asset classes directly, or do you use managed funds such as unit trusts, property syndicates, insurance bonds, and friendly society bonds?
3. THE BEST OWNER In what name will each asset be held for ease of estate planning and to minimise tax? We cover this in the sections You can’t take it with you and Taxation for retirees.
Asset allocation
All professional money managers and financial advisers focus on asset allocation — the term given to the way your investments are spread across asset classes. They usually look for a spread across Australian cash, Australian and international fixed-interest investments, Australian listed and unlisted property, and Australian and international shares. They may also look at putting some funds in alternative investments.
It is the percentage of assets in each class that determines the volatility of a portfolio, and ultimately its overall performance.
In practice, most financial advisers regularly receive suggested asset allocation models from their research sources. These are different for each type of client and vary with the research analysts’ views of the market.
In the next few chapters, we will look at the major asset classes, and consider the advantages and disadvantages of the investment vehicles available in each of them.
Remember, if your investment monies are in superannuation, you always have the simple option of letting your fund decide how much of your money should be invested across each asset class. The odds are that they will do a better job than you could, and a large superannuation fund will probably use all the investment vehicles I’m going to explain.
Summing up
• Every investment you make has advantages and disadvantages. Make sure you know what they are before you take action.
• Investments produce income, capital growth, or both.
• Capital growth is not something which is happening — it is something which has happened.
• Invest in growth assets like property or shares with a seven- to ten-year time frame.
• Investment returns are not all taxed the same: the only returns that count are the ones you get to keep after tax.
• The purpose of the investment should influence the type of investment you make.
• When making an investment, consider in what name it should be held for maximum long term tax-effectiveness.
• Diversification is the cornerstone of successful investment. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, or all your investments in one asset class.
3
Cash investments
Money is like an arm or a leg — use it or lose it. — Henry Ford
If you are retired, or nearing retirement, it’s important to keep sufficient cash on hand for the next three to four years’ expenditure. When the market falls, draw on your cash investments. This gives you time to ride out the bad years in the property or share markets — you never want to put yourself in a situation where you are forced to dump quality assets at bargain prices.
Let’s consider the options.
Bank interest
This is the asset that people are most familiar with. We have had bank accounts since we were kids, and it would be hard to imagine getting through life today without a bank account of some kind. Your money is either on call or invested in a term deposit, where you should be getting a higher rate than if the money was on call. The advantage of bank deposits is safety — the disadvantages are low rates of return, and