When you reach the age when investing in green bananas no longer makes good economic sense, it comes as a shock when your bank sends you a friendly letter addressed to you by your Christian name. Getting excited, thinking it could be some good news, what a kick in the ribs it was to be informed that your bank had dropped the interest rate on your short-term investment to 1.35% per annum. Why bother paying anything?
Now I am sure an investment adviser will comment that it is my own stupidity for investing in short-term investments. But, of course, being of the golden age, you never know when they will come to pick you up for your final ride by ambulance to a private hospital, where you will be placed in ICU at a cost per day equivalent to the rates charged by the best game lodges in the Timbavati, but without the game drives. One cannot help but remember the good old days of banking, when the bank manager knew you personally and even the name of your wife.
If you owed the bank enough, you and your wife might even be invited to dinner at the club. Those days are over — what a great pity. Today, after having been a customer of the same bank for about 60 years, one has become just a long number.
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Visiting a bank is a bit like visiting a Home Affairs office requesting a new passport, where the official consulted manages so successfully to get the message across that your biggest mistake ever was to have been born. But I have finally realised why they cut my rate: the CEO has to earn an ever-increasing annual income, which, in my bank’s case, is about 3 500 times my monthly retirement income. So, you see, we, the Golden Oldies, are not being robbed; we are just forfeiting a portion of our retirement income to ensure a substantial annual increase for the CEO and all his sidekicks.
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