KEY POINTS:
I have never, until this week, had any money to invest. Despite the urging many years ago of my thrifty mother, I did not accept her advice that I should regularly put money aside for a rainy day.
I intended, I said to myself, to use whatever money I had to make every day a sunny day. Thus I have lived well, if not necessarily wisely, for the past 30 or so years of my working life, keeping in a savings account only enough to save for a large purchase or an emergency.
But things change, and nowadays, as a pensioner with only a smidgen of additional income, belt-tightening is the order of the day. I find myself having to remember my mother's admonition that if I look after the pennies the pounds will look after themselves.
It is an unpleasant, almost humiliating, experience to find myself, for instance, comparing products in the supermarket to get the best value for money. It is hugely irritating to have to consider buying cheaper cuts of meat - sirloin steak instead of fillet, lamb chops instead of cutlets - and almost intolerable to find myself counting the number of cigarettes I smoke and resolving, futilely, to cut back.
Don't get the idea I'm complaining. I made my choices through life and am happy to take the consequences. If this is the time I have to learn thrift, then so be it - it can't do me any harm.
I have been broke several times in the past but have never gone without a roof over my head, food to eat, clothes to wear and a vehicle to get around in. God promises to meet the needs of his people; our wants we take care of ourselves.
The money I have to invest comes from selling our home in Auckland and buying much cheaper elsewhere. It is a paltry sum by today's standards, but it is all we have and the interest earned, and if necessary the principal, is intended to provide a buffer against penury.
It will not, therefore, be invested in a finance company. I know little of finance but I do know that the higher the interest rate offered the higher the risk to the investor, and that people who borrow from finance companies are invariably those to whom the banks won't lend.
So I have little sympathy for those so-called "mum and dad" investors who have done their chips in the latest finance company failures. They took the risk; they paid the price.
I have nothing against finance companies. All I know is that I'm not interested in obtaining a few per cent more in interest income when my bank pays a perfectly adequate rate on term deposits and my principal is, if you'll pardon the pun, as safe as a bank.
The denizens of the financial world whom I abhor and despise are those usurious moneylenders who prey on the poor and ignorant and whose come-on advertisements fill column after column of the classified ads in the suburban giveaway newspapers. These bloodsuckers on the underbelly of our economy with their siren song of "instant cash" are bringing untold misery and despair to thousands of people. They infest the poorer suburbs like fleas, and like fleas suck the blood of their victims.
They generate debt among those least able to afford it and, as the 17th-century English clergyman and historian Thomas Fuller once said, "Debt is the worst poverty".
If the collapse of the latest batch of finance companies leads the Government to introduce legislation that will force these parasites to mend their ways, then they will not have been in vain.
The problem, of course, is greed - one of the seven deadly sins - which seems to be flourishing more today than it ever has in my lifetime. None of us is exempt from it, certainly not me. I still, for instance, buy a weekly Lotto ticket. But greed is not something I take for granted.
That cannot, unfortunately, be said of people in general these days, even this esteemed newspaper, which in an editorial last week blandly informed us: "Greed generates growth of capital, consumption, employment, taxation and public services".
No mention of the other things that greed generates, such as rampant materialism, crime, overconsumption, social inequality, crushing personal debt, poverty, hunger, homelessness, immorality ... just to name a few.
As for me, I go along with the 18th-century economist and philosopher Adam Smith: "What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clear conscience?"
* garth.george@hotmail.com
