Financial Requirement - Cash Savings - Premium Bonds & SIPP Pension Pot

Nice one, I've not checked yet.

XXV again his month, better than last month's nothing.

ERNIE is a true random number machine it's been upgraded and improved for decades, the draw is fair.

I bought £100 for my grand daughter last year, my own holding is £7450, I have been lucky beyond my holding, for me it's fun and I think everyone should have a small stake in the Premium Bonds, yeah you might never win anything but then again you might.

Nothing this time!

Nothing again, I'm probably going to cash in a large part of my holdings.

It's been fun in the good times.

Yes that's true, but it's also true of every decision any of us ever made in our lives.

In quantum mechanics every decision or measurement creates a branch of reality, every second the world you personally inhabit with your mind experiences 10 to the power 'f*ck knows' (but a very large number) of branches, your consciousness inhabits one of them, that one is not the same one I find myself in now with another version of you who will reply to this post

Real life is feckin amazing and maybe the next branch taken in the next femtosecond results in me winning next month with a much smaller holding, however the odds are seriously against that

edit: I probably got the scale wrong, likely closer to a quectosecond

So a vandal comes in and f*cks the bond market, now nobody trusts the dollar and everyone wants out of US t-bonds cause they're terrified that the liar in chief and his cronies will convert the entire US debt into 100 year bonds effectively defaulting on their debt.

So where does the money go, well even though everyone knows that equities are overvalued they put their money into stocks, propping up the bubble in stocks, they also redirect some investment into other countries bonds but who knows if those are safe either, so scared of bonds and equities a lot of capital gets diverted into precious metals and the price explodes and on top of that a bunch of these feckin nutters gamble on metal futures, because none of them do anything actually useful, no no no they just gamble with borrowed money.

Then the morons that created this crisis appoint a fecking Epstein file sicko as chair of the fed one who is said to support lowering intrest rates which the sicko in chief is desperate for, this pushes up bond yields and triggers a cascade sell off in gold and silver as the gamblers leveraged positions get shown up by margin calls that they cant fund, so sell off after sell off.

What do I know I'm a 67 year old idiot with a heart condition, I wouldn't presume to have any idea where all this will go in 5 to 10 years and I'll probably be dead anyway, but in the short term I think gold will probably continue to rise (and silver) if for no other reason than there are few other places to put investment cash.

Thing is a lot of the gold price is 'paper gold' it's not real it's just Exchange Traded Funds it's not the yellow metal that gets dug out of the ground.

Real gold well that has legitimate value in electronics and other technologies but it's not a lot of use in a crashed post technological world you can't eat it it's inappropriate for construction, it's only appeal is to the warlords that will be ruling over you who get mesmerised by shiny things.

For me gold is facinating only because of the way that most of it comes to exist in this universe, the vast majority of the gold we find in this world was created billions of years ago, before the solar system formed, in the collisions of pairs of neutron stars.

So I don't know what way it will go, my guess is up for a year or two until the next major financial crash, the current metals crash I think is very temporary as there's not a lot of places to park money.

edit: my personal holding is 10g of 14 carat gold in the form of a necklace that Ana got me to buy about 15 years ago, she's had her eye on disappearing it for the last 15 years but she's out of luck as it's never travelling to the Philippines ever again.

Who's not positive I only multiplied the number of universe branches by an extra 10^15 every second

No I was contracted out for around 15 years and I'm on the full (new) state pension, what you lose with contracting out is the SERPS and S2P additional amount that would have increased your pension above the current maximum for the new state pension, what's important is the total number of years, I think I had 48 but the required amount is 35 I think.

People who paid SERPS and S2P and who were never contracted out would have been entitled to substantially more than the £241.30 per week and as a result their SERPS and S2P rights were protected and factored into the calculation of their weekly rate. In my case under the old state pension rules I would have gotten less than the new state pension when calculating the old state pension + SERPS and S2P so anyone in that position actually won out and got uprated to the new state pension maximum, those who were never contracted out can get a lot lot more per week, some people are on more than £350 a week under the new rules because they were never contracted out and paid possibly Graduated Pension, SERPS and S2P throughout their working lives but retired after the new rules came into effect in 2016.

The new state pension was brought in to simplify the calculations (aye sure) but it's going to take 30 odd years or more before there's no one left with the need for the consideration of their SERPS and S2P contributions.

Are you sure that paying more now while you are in receipt of your state pension already will actually increase your pension payment?

Just a question are you dealing with the International Pension Centre, this lot International Pension Centre - GOV.UK is that where your letter came from?