By Phil Spalding

cambolc.co.uk, @cambolc, linkedin.com/in/philipspalding66

Sunday has come round again, so time for a five hundred word blog on the philosophy of well being. Being the Wellbeing facilitator (see Linkedin Profile above) for a number of years at one of Suffolk’s now defunct Middle Schools it is now beholden to me look at another ten year plan. Those of you that are familiar with Cambridge Online Learning Community Blogger Space will be aware of the ten year plans I have put into place in the past. Well time for Cambolc or Cambridge Online Learning Community to consider the next ten years!

Why the next ten years? Is that a bit ambitious? Well a plan is just a plan and only that! With the change in State pension rules meaning people of my age will not be able to draw the State pension until they are 68. Come next birthday I will have ten years before I become economically active as regards the state pension. The word retirement in the Silicon Age is virtually obsolete as humans in the first world continue to live longer than their ancestors.

Millennials are not looking at flexible working/lifestyle of teleworking and the fact they know they will not work for the same company for 30 plus years before retiring on a company and state pension. People have to take more charge of their lifestyles that their grandparents may previously have done. Wage slavery for the educated you would think should not exist. However, the culture of borrowing even for education with student loans is a British cultural phenomenon. The feudal model of service for land, is not really that different from the historic tallyman, to hire purchase, credit cards and payday loans.

The most pernicious trap is the credit trap. My family and I are personally at working the probate process on my recently departed fathers’ estate. Being one of the war babies of 1942 his financial participation after an apprenticeship the live to day pay tomorrow attitude that was encouraged by financial institutions. Eventually at the age of 63 when ill health forced a retirement there was the final financial trick of equity release. My paternal grandfather a Sargent in the second World War rented off relatives and when he passed at 52 he the equivalent of 145 times the average 1966 weekly wage. He left the army and was offered the house he was living in by his Aunt for the amount of his demob money. He in hindsight may have made a mistake. Those houses in Hackney are now worth £4 million on Rightmove. In fact from one conveyancing the estimate is that house prices have increased by 100 fold since 1966.

The question is how we get out of this cycle with the British Financial Sector increasingly being sold to Global Companies. Is the stability of the world assured because finances are international rather than intranational? Would we ever really see a world conflict again because we do not have a Krupps or a Vickers representing single nations as we had in and just before World War I? Who knows this is why the blog is called the Sunday Muse.

To answer the question of “who is the one person in the world to whom you matter?” The ideal answer should be yourself.

A little bit more than 500 pennies of thoughts but personally do not mind giving a penny of this personal and self-tailored opinion. I have a solution that I am carrying out at the moment and it seems to be a good start to the ten year plan.