A friend who recently retired called. She was wondering how she should use her retirement corpus. I have a long list in mind and began to panic, she said. Like what I asked? Renovate my home, buy a new car, take some much postponed trips and maybe buy some jewellery, she answered. What about investing? She was not sure if that was even needed. For a single woman living in her own house, what could go wrong, she asked. And that's how we began that long conversation.
My friend is not dumb. She held a fairly senior job that paid well before she retired. She won’t be earning a pension, but that does not bother her much. She suffers from the syndrome many of us can identify with — the inability to spend.