notes on speculative pension portfolio diversification

greetings

just another informal (yet informative, i trust) look at my provisional retirement (fiscal) plans, look you see. whereas i claim no expertise in this particular subject (or any), no doubt some shall have in place quite similar plans to me. others, of course, will wish to see what i am doing in regards of such arrangements, so that they know it is the wrong thing to do and do something else instead. 

my preferred form of pension (or provident fund, whichever it most closely resembles) fund is that one which goes by the name of "national lottery". the reasons for investing in this particular one are as simple as they are straightforward. costs for entering are somewhat minimal, the roi (that's return on investment) rate is frankly staggering and, if your policy number happens to be "drawn", you can pretty much retire almost immediately. why would one not trust their future financial safety to such?

recently i have, somewhat unexpectedly, been lured into diversifying my investment in this particular scheme. usually i have remained an investor (of sorts) in the classical variation of this "lottery" pension fund. for fairly obvious reasons i have been reluctant to invest in the so-called "euro millions" scheme, with easily the most overt of those obvious reasons being that it costs more. however, their recent proposal - that of a £181 million (181,000,000 one pound coins, for clarity) - was quite the irresistible investment opportunity. 

sadly, and i can only assume to presume this was a colossal clusterf**k of an administrative error, it turned out that they went and gave my pension payout (all one hundred and eighty one million pound coins of money) in its entirety to, and i can scarcely believe i am typing this, a Frenchie. off of France. goodness knows what sort of trivial things they shall waste my old age nest egg on, but i suppose i should say that i hope they enjoy it. 

by means of some sort of perverse sense of balanced compensation, the administrators of the euro millions pension fund did determine that my policy number(s) did entitle me to a part pension payment. the amount which this came to (and let us not lose sight of my initial investment being £2.50) was somewhere around £3.70, or if you like one hundred and eighty million nine hundred and ninety thousand nine hundred and ninety six (ish) pound coins south of the amount i had in good faith reasonably expected to be getting. oh. 

having no real sense of idea or clue as to what to do with this partial pension (i did call a broker, and a financial advisory service, but in both instances i was told to f*** off when i revealed the amount i was wondering what to do with), i made an impulsive and immediate investment decision at the shop. that is, of course, the scratch card pension membership, or "scratchie", which you can see above. 

your attention is drawn, in the first instance, to the pension liability waiver which is published on the reverse of the "scratchie". a side, true, that is seldom studied by investors. they do not hide the fact of how this retirement annuity is very little else but a gamble. well, all investments are, to some extent. by undertaking to enter this pension fund system, you are by default acknowledging that you accept there is only something of a 20% chance of securing any sort of later life income. from what i recall, this is around about the same kind of odds what the gay robot told the illegal people smuggler he had of surviving an asteroid field or something in that Star Wars film. no, the other one. 

a question that some of you will have (no doubt) would of course pertain to whether or not i stayed true and loyal to the manner and means by which one "does" a "scratchie", or indeed "scratchy" if that is your preference for spelling. regrettably, no. for those of you less informed in the social mannerisms of this, it is quite often the case that people what buy these pension fund schemes, often in multiple numbers, do not hesitate to stand at the very till where they purchased them and scratch away. they shall do so no matter how large a queue waits for service behind them, for they either do not care or as point of fact appreciate that they might be unwitting spectators to seeing someone "win" a pension. 

others are, of course more (or less, depending on your perspective) considerate. rather than stand at the till to scratch and block the administration of service, they will instead take just a few steps and commence the ceremonial scratching of the "scratchie" in the shop doorway. this serves a strange double purpose, as it equally blocks people from entering the premises just as it prevents other patrons from leaving. i opted not to do this, either, at all. 

perhaps my reluctance to do the "scratchie" in a way which would cause maximum disruption or at the least a bit of a delay to others put a kind of jinx or curse on me, then. that, to me, would be a perfectly reasonable way to explain why this particular pension fund investment failed. and failed it did, but not miserably. for some reason your pension card is (or was) required to reflect three equal amounts of the value of the pension, whereas mine was 33% short of this optimal target. this i discovered quite some time after investment, at home, when i remembered that i had this policy and took a coin to it. 

will i be dabbling, or diversifying, into this "scratchie" pension scheme again in the future? no. well, not immediately, at least as far as i have any plans. the things just hold little appeal, if any, for me. others, i appreciate, appear to invest in them to the point of addiction. perhaps they should not, but how someone else arranges their pension funding is precisely none of my business. 

there are some of you (and i like to regard you as the more elegant percentage of readers) who are wondering what, exactly happened to the remainder of my provisional pension payout. as the image presented of the "scratchie", in the greater good of Commodore 64 mode, is only a £1 one, what became of the balance of the funds received? 

it was most decidedly so that a lack of imagination momentarily struck me, so i just requested yet one more pension policy off of the "euro millions". rather than waste time curating and selecting my own numbers for this one, i merely requested the "lucky dip" form of portfolio. 

has this pension policy been any more, or as usual less, successful than previous ones? momentarily the matter is very much all that schrödinger's cat thing, for at the time of writing it is not so that the pension fund administrators have "drawn" the numbers in correlation to fund membership numbers. 

generally i have noted (or observed) that any such instance of referencing this form of pension provision incentive is accompanied by a warning along the lines of stating that winners know when to quit, and also that when the fun stops one should stop. i am unsure such a requirements exists for this, but one could not describe my doubt for such as steadfast, so there you go.

be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!