Gran’s on the money

by Alan Cornell
14th April 2015

A few years ago I went to one of those free seminars they advertise on 3AW. It was supposed to be a PowerPoint presentation but the cord didn’t even reach the powerpoint, that’s how hopeless they were.

Eventually they found an extension cord and showed us all these graphs and pie charts about how to fund your retirement until life expectancy. Too bad if you happen to live longer than expected but what do you expect from a free seminar?

The bloke said if you want to save for a rainy day you’ve got two options. The first was about investing in property but my hearing aid battery packed it in at that point and I couldn’t make head nor tale of it all. Some stuff about negative earrings and real estate Asians, and when they got on to sex and thirty-twos I tuned out altogether.

The second option was to invest in the stock market and I’m thinking what do I want with a herd of farty cud-chewers when he says if you really want a comfortable future the best thing to do is put your money in chairs and sit on them.

Well I thought you’re the expert so I went out and bought a whole stack of chairs and I put them in the garage and every now and then I go out and sit on them.

But you can’t just buy any old chairs. Not on your Nelly! You have to have a diversified portfolio of blue chipped chairs and speculative chairs but your blue chipped chairs are the key to your whole investment strategy. So I went to Ikea and they had plenty of blue chairs though none of them were chipped but I bought 150 anyway. They all had keys that were way too fiddly for me but I got Jasper to put them together and by the time he’d stacked them all in the garage most of them were chipped in fact some of them were completely stuffed.

But like I said, I still needed some speculative chairs because they’re the ones that go up and down all the time. Anyway, I found some little humdingers at Officeworks with a little lever under the seat that makes them go up and down so I thought that’ll do this little black duck and I bought a hundred.

So I had all my chairs stacked in the garage and it felt really comfortable, financially speaking. I’d go out and sit on my chairs while they appreciated and you can appreciate how I appreciated my chairs appreciating.

But like I always say, you should never count your chickens till they’re hatched. And sure enough along comes a rainy day and it turns out the garage roof leaks and I have to sell some of my chairs. So I put a stack of them on eBay, the speculative ones that go up and down but it turned out they hadn’t gone up they’d only gone down. The chairs I bought at Officeworks for $69 each were still $69 each at Officeworks and nobody wanted to pay more than $69 for mine, in fact, no one would even give me what I paid for them so I had to try selling some of my blue chipped chairs. So I tried selling my blue Plonkadonka chairs that cost me $239 each and the best I could get was fifty bucks on Gumtree and when the lady found out they were chipped she wouldn’t take them anyway.

So I sent an email to the bloke from the seminar saying your chair strategy stinks, rude letter following. And he wrote back and said if my earnings per chair ratio was underperforming I should turn them over. I said it will take us hours to turn them all over but he said you can’t sit on them any longer so I got Jasper to turn them all over and the bloke was right.

“You can’t sit on them any longer.”