Standard Life Insurance? Part 2.

Posted on March 29, 2020 by john graham

This blog is the sequel to the post I wrote last month about my investigation into a dripping tap of wasted money that I have  been paying out for over 40 years !   (You can find it by clicking on February 2020 in the Archive —— just in case anyone reads this in the cloud in 40 years time and can’t speak to a wonderful Scottish lady called Ellen who assisted me in my search for the lost policy)

The story began in 1972 when I wanted to pay for a deposit on my first house,.    I had not got a house, but if you wanted to buy one at an auction you had to cough up 10% of the money straight away and pay the balance in 28 days.   As a poorly paid, still yet to qualify, long-haired architect in Nottingham I was seen as quite a risk by the bank manager when I asked him for the huge sum of £3000 !     I didn’t have a mask or a gun, but you would think I was holding up his West Bridgeford branch of the NatWest bank.    No alarm bells rang, but he sent me packing with an instruction to “ Get yourself £3000 of life insurance as security,  before I can lend you a penny !”     I must admit I had not intended to threaten the whole future of the banking industry with my reckless spending.    Who knows, I might have caused a run on the pound ?

So off I went to find a trusted friend, a stalwart of the insurance world.   Where else but in the club  house of  Old Nottinghamians Rugby Club.    People you could fall back on after a failed bank robbery😀     What better than a prop forward?    Although, John Ullyat was better at propping up the bar these days, when he wasn’t selling life insurance.

Now I’ve got it 💡   Thanks to that tight-fisted bank manager and my trusty prop forward friend that is how I finally secured my first house, with a £3,000 life insurance policy from Standard Life.    Phew!  That took a bit of remembering.

Forty seven years and 2345 payments of £2.68 pence  later the lovely lady from Standard Life tells me it is now worth  a vast fortune of £1,977 and 79 pence, if I wish to surrender it.    But, as a one-time attempted bank robber, I’m Butch Cassidy, or maybe The Sundance Kid and you’re not getting my money back.    I’m going to keep paying the £2.68 pence until I get my £3,000 life insurance or I’ll die doing it!

If my calculations are correct I should be robbing the bank or at least the Standard Life Insurance Company in just another 26 years ! 🤠

 

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Rugby Balls Up🏉🏉

Posted on March 22, 2020 by john graham

This post follows my earlier post about the impact of Coronavirus on the Rugby world and my once excellent all winning team  Leicester Tigers.

They have not been playing well all season  ,,,,  dropping the 🏉 …… not catching the 🏉 …… missing tackles …. missing through injury …. missing through endless International matches.    It’s not been a good season so far☹️       I think the players might have had Coronavirus for some time, possibly for several seasons !

The old buffers at the Rugby Football Union have called a “temporary” halt to the season which could last until April.    No mention of wether they ment April 2020 or April 2021 or just sometime in the distant future.      They have sent our International players back.       Unfortunately half of them are injured and the other half have to go into quarantine ☹️

That’s the bad news, but, there is some good news to brighten up the loyal fans.    Our excellent ever optimistic coach, Jordan Murphy has been thinking out of the box to come up with a recovery plan.     He has recruited some new players from South Africa and New Zealand where Coronavirus hasn’t taken hold yet.    He has just got to figure out how to get them over here now there are no plane flights.  Rumour has is he is also looking at China, so we can get a few more players with unpronounceable names into the starting line up 🤡

Jordan is adamant that next weeks game against top of the table Exeter Chiefs will still go ahead.     “If Exeter don’t turn up we should win and get a bonus point ! ” said Jordan in a rousing team talk to each player individually, now that they are not allowed to gather in groups.       They also haven’t been able to train together because of the Governments new rules on social distancing.

Ticket sales will have to be limited to FOUR.    One in each stand and all will have to ware the new Tiger Onesie protective gear which can be purchased in the club shop for only  £150 plus VAT.     Masks are extra.

🏉 HURRY GET YOUR TICKET TODAY 🏉

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Corona V GrumbleSmiles

Posted on March 18, 2020 by john graham

You can’t let all this endless talk about Coronavirus get you down.

Goodness knows there are plenty of reasons to  grumble about it :-

  • confined to the house for the next twelve weeks – nationalised house arrest courtesy of Bodj 🤡
  • whatsmore it will probably be a lot longer than this  —— maybe 6 months without time off for good behaviour.     Bodj has a track record of missing deadlines, remember Brexit🤡
  • No sport on the tele – no rugby 🏉   no football ⚽️ no cricket , 🏏 and no tennis  🏸— thank goodness.
  • No going to watch Leicester Tigers — although this season that was turning out to be a bit of a trial anyway☹️
  • No cruises, definitely no cruises.
  • Our politicians are busy printing and spending money we haven’t got. Still it makes them think they are doing something in a crisis.
  • Every TV news programme with exactly the same news as every other  news programme, repeated every hour of every day.
  • Scientists emerging from laboratories to step into the TV sunlight for their two minutes of fame.   Professors of virology and epidemiology and immunology and immunodeficiency and sociology and behavioural science and all sorts of ologies you have never even heard of.    All with “expert “ opinions on their ologies.     From eminent universities like Oxford and Cambridge and Lancaster and Doncaster and every other caster.      Probably everybody is a Professor at sometime in their life 👨‍🎓
  • Countless reminders about washing your hands, again and again and again.

But what about Coronavirus smiles :-

  • With all the flight bans and empty cruise ships and shut down shops and factories we are dramatically cutting down our carbon emissions, so Coronavirus could save the planet from global warming. —- although there might not be many older people left to enjoy it.
  • Spring is on the way and the birds are singing.   Obviously no one has told the flowers or the birds about CORONAVIRUS !
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Brave ??? NewWorld

Posted on March 15, 2020 by john graham

We are waking up in a New World, but we don’t know yet if it will be a Brave one.    That will depend on how much changes and how much we can hold on to …….. and for a while we won’t know.

WHAT  COULD  CHANGE in the short term?

  • We may not all be here, but the lottery of who will be and who won’t has yet to be drawn.
  • What seems clear so far is that there will not be so many older people.
  • Nor will there be any cruises for the foreseeable future.
  • Our money will be worth a lot lees or in the worst case worthless.
  • Holding people and whole countries to ransom could be the new norm ?
  • Brexit will be a thing of the past, because there will be no Europe to exit.
  • We won’t need a new runway at Heathrow, because there will be a lot less airlines and nowhere to fly to.
  • HS2 need never be built, because we will not need to rush anywhere.
  • We will not require Bodj’s 40  new hospitals, because there will be plenty of spare beds soon and any way we won’t have any medicine.

The House of Lards won’t need to be abolished, because most of them will have died off.    The House of Commons will become a debating chamber purely for daytime TV, because events will continue to unfold long before our politicians can do anything about them.

The birds will still tweet and there will be something to eat.

             MORE OF THIS ADVENTURE NEXT WEEK.

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Rugby Balls🏉

Posted on March 8, 2020 by john graham

The Rugby Football Union are extremely concerned about the corona virus now that two International matches against Italy have had to be cancelled.     They are very worried about the loss of income if more matches can’t go ahead, so they have devised a cunning plan, which involves a new set of rules for the game.

  • The pitch will be disinfected before the match and players scoring a try will not touch down in case it gets the ball dirty.
  • Wipe ball with anti-septic cloth before passing it on to another player.
  • No touching other players just shout BOO!
  • No drinking from shared bottles, the game is to be stopped every 10 minutes for players to get their own bottle from the touch line.
  • Players with a blood injury during the game will be immediately be sent to hospital and blood tested. They can return to the pitch if they can get back before the match is over.
  • All pies and pints sold will contain a small measure of Dettol to protect other spectators.   This is not likely to make the pies taste any different😀
  • Players temperatures will be tested at half time and anyone over  98 degrees will be given a red card and sent into quarantine for the next two weeks.
  • The referee will not be allowed to blow his whistle as it might spread germs, instead he will wave a red flag 🚩 and jump up and down on the spot until the players stop running about.
  • There will be no hand shakes after match just buy every one a drink of vitamin C.
  • Spectators are most welcome, because the RFU needs the income, but they should not sing or shout during the game, just polite clapping and definitely no high fives.
  • After the game they should troupe out of the ground leaving five feet between them and the next person.    This may mean it take four or five hours to exit the stadium.
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£168.50 per week !

Posted on March 8, 2020 by john graham

That is the National State Pension in the UK.    Or put another way it is about £8,000 a year.   Obviously that must be successive Government’s view of how much you need to live on.      Surely everyone wants older people to have a happy life in old age, so that must be how much you need.

It is lower than the minimum wage —— if you say £8.50 per hour for a 35 hour working week, which amounts to around £15, ooo a year.   The State pension is about half of it and as the minimum wage goes up in the next few years the pension will slip proportionately lower.

Still, older people can live quite cheaply.    No kids to support, no mortgage to pay for, they don’t have to buy all the latest branded clothes or to fork out for clubs and booze at the weekend.     A new car is a thing of the past and who needs a holiday when your old ?     That must be the Governments thinking.

 

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Standard Life insurance ????

Posted on February 23, 2020 by john graham

Once upon a time, in the days of real people, before the advent of the internet I took out a life insurance.   It was fourty six years ago give or take a year or two.   I hardly remember what it was for,  but I know I did it because I have been paying out £2.68  every month since by direct debit.  Still it is such a small sum I have never bothered with it since.    Indeed I would still not have thought about it, because bank computers and insurance computers do all the transferring of the money and the only paper record is one line in a bank statement that I only glance at now and again.    If I am having my tea at the time it is not surprising that £2 and 68  pence doesn’t grab my full attention.

So when my lovely wife Mo asked me the other day, what exactly had I been wasting £2.68 every month for the last 46 years, I couldn’t actually remember.   Was it to cover my secret gambling addiction?  Or maybe blackmail pay-off that I hadn’t mentioned to her ?   Or perhaps a protection racketeer who had his claws into me over an unpaid parking fine ?     Who knows ?

The name “Standard Life” kept coming to mind and then I vaguely remembered I took out a life insurance all those years ago.   How much for and why I don’t recall. It was something to do with securing a loan on my first house.   I think ?   Those were in my rugby playing days and a prop forward called John did it for me over a round of drinks.     Signed, sealed, delivered and long forgotten after the next beer !

So, like a dog with a bone or more kindly like Detective Chief inspector Morse on a long lost mystery case, I set out to track down the missing millions 😀🐕‍🦺  armed only with a name and a  policy number.

A quick phone-call to Standard Life connected me to an automatic message system, where I could press 1 for this and 2 for that and 3 for something else, but nothing for 46 year old lost property.   Eventually, I did get to speak to a  real person called Margaret, unfortunately she only spoke Scottish and I couldn’t understand her.     I did gather she wanted to ask me some security questions.  So I told her my name, my date of birth, my address, my policy number and what I was phoning about .  Then she told me I  needed another department and she put me through to another automatic message system 😤

I listened to a lot of music and several apologies for keeping me waiting and then a message about completing a brief survey about their customer service or maybe if I didn’t want to wait any longer I could go on-line to their website.  I never did get asked to complete the survey.
Finally after waiting about 20 minutes, which I suppose is not bad after no contact for 46 years, I got to speak to a real person called Ellen who spoke real English.     Then a few more security questions, in fact the very same ones as I had given answers to Maggie 20 minutes ago, but perhaps they had got lost in translation.   Now at last we were beginning to get somewhere.   She found the policy, but couldn’t tell me any more without some more security questions.

Where did I work when I took out the insurance ?    So I told her but they had no record of that.  How about where did I live at the time I took out the insurance?  So I told her but they had no record of that either.   I was starting to wonder if I had ever existed.    Still I must have been paying £2.68 for something to someone at some time or other.   Unless Standard Life is an insurance black hole.

Ellen couldn’t have been nicer and she said she would get someone to look in the archives because they don’t do this type of insurance anymore.     Oh and they have changed their name,  but they will contact me within 10 days or so.
In the meantime I will keep paying the £2.68 just in case I insured myself for a million pounds all those years ago😀

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£Trillion – Give it all back

Posted on February 16, 2020 by john graham

All of my earlier ideas for how older people could use the accumulated wealth in all their assets, have been directed at raising the profile of older people in society.    At the moment they are too often forgotten or wished away, or worst of all, ignored completely.

In the next couple of decades, the population of older people in the UK is set to double.  This will be a massive problem unless attitudes towards older people and by older people themselves in society change dramatically.    Greater longevity inevitably leads to bigger demands on the health service and it is essential that we gear up for this, rather than regarding older people as “bed blockers” and a burden on society.

It’s also vital that everywhere and everything becomes much more accessible and age friendly.    Currently the rapid advance of technology is leaving far too many people behind.  Local shops, post offices and banks are all closing.    More and more services are going online.    This is the reverse of what needs to happen but I don’t mean that we turn technology back.    A key thing to do is to make technology much more easy to use for older people.

One way of doing this is for older people themselves to take a lead with a “GIVE IT ALL BACK CAMPAIGN”.    This initiative would invest in projects which make life easier for older people but could also be used by everybody else in society.

Older people are already the backbone of many voluntary organisations, where they give their time freely for a charitable endeavour.    Now they could use their new found £Trillions by donating to charities doing research into a variety of medical conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, hearing and sight loss, mobility etc.

It should not only be things that go directly to older people.    The “GIVE BACK CAMPAIGN” should support intergenerational projects, linking the wisdom of older people with the needs of the younger generation.    Socialising and communicating skills could be shared with a younger generation whose best friend is an iPhone.    The other side of the coin is that young people could teach older people how to use modern technology.

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£Trillion Dogs

Posted on February 9, 2020 by john graham

I’ve already come up with several ideas of how the £Trillion locked up in older peoples’ assets could be better used to more fully appreciate and integrate older people into society.

So here’s a big idea from Coco🐶

What about if every older person had a dog to look after🐕

Then they would have to go dog walking every day and the older people would get a lot more exercise and be healthier 🐕‍🦺

Most dogs are automatically friendly with other dogs and while they are sniffing around, their owners have to talk to each other, so this is a great way for isolated and lonely people to get out and about and become more a part of their community 🦮

Keeping their dog owners healthy will save the NHS millions of pounds, so the least that GPs should do is offer dogs on prescription 🐩

A vast increase in the number of dogs would be good overall for the economy.  Creating new jobs for adults as dog trainers, walkers, groomers and shampoo & setters.  Then there would have to be a lot more vets and pet shops in every town.

Most of all this would be great fun for both dogs and older people.  Every town, village and city could have an annual dog show.  Then there would be the biggest Crufts Dog Show ever!

🐶  🐕  🐕‍🦺  🦮  🐩

 

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£Trillion Zimmers

Posted on February 5, 2020 by john graham

This post follows on from my initial idea of what older people could do collectively with their £4.7 trillions of savings currently locked in their houses.  I’ve put forward several ideas already but this one reflects the stereo typical view that most people have of elderly people.   So here’s a humurous and inexpensive way of changing that perception.

What if we buy every older person a Zimmer frame?   Even if they don’t need it.   Then they can all walk slowly around holding up the traffic and getting in the way of young people rushing along with their heads down texting on their mobile phones.
Zimmers could be fitted with headlights and horns.   Most importantly a space could be included on the front of the Zimmer frame for sponsored advertising.

This quiet demonstration could be held in every town, every Friday, henceforth to be known as “Zimmer Fridays”.  Eventually the politicians, both local and national, would realise that it is in their interest to make towns and cities and all their public spaces, much more age friendly.

BETTER TO HAVE OLDER PEOPLE BLOCKING THE PAVEMENTS WHILST EXERCISING, RATHER THAN LANGUISHING IN HOSPITAL BEDS, OR LOUNGING AT HOME ON THE SOFA IN FRONT OF DAYTIME TV.

 

 

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