Misadventures by Sylvia Smith

Author:Sylvia Smith [Sylvia Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781847677426
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2009-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

I was offered a job at that probation office but I considered the salary too low and I didn’t like their set-up of a supervising secretary being in charge of the daily workload and of all the other secretaries, which would have included me.

1985

MY INVESTMENTS

I reached the age of forty. It was such a milestone I took a hard look at my past life. I felt I hadn’t done very much with it. I had never married or lived abroad. I had led the life of a single woman, having nice clothes, nice holidays, nice cars, nice evenings out, and, despite the fact that several men had fallen in love with me, I’d had few romances. I thought to myself, ‘What can I do about this? I don’t want to get to sixty and find I still haven’t done anything worthwhile.’ I decided I would like to achieve something and I thought, ‘What can I achieve?’ My next thought was, ‘How about I make myself rich.’

I decided to make long-term investments which I hoped would eventually make high profits. I bought one hundred shares each in five leading British companies and I slowly bought large blocks of Premium Bonds because I thought ‘How else can I make a hundred thousand pounds?’ Also, I saw an advertisement in a newspaper which stated that if I invested in a leading bank’s investment scheme and put down at least a one hundred pound deposit and invested a minimum of twenty pounds per month over a period of nine years, my money would treble. I considered this investment to be a first-class idea so I filled in the bank’s form, enclosed my deposit and sorted out a Standing Order with my bankers.

Six years passed by. During this time I made approximately sixty pounds a year in premiums from my shares. I won fifty pounds four times on my Premium Bonds and I had continued investing my twenty pounds monthly. Then the recession caught up with me. I was made redundant by a building company and I returned to temping halfway through the summer, which is usually the busiest time for temps, only to find there was no work available. Despite trying my best to find work, I was to be unemployed for the following two years.

Faced with unemployment pay of thirty-nine pounds a week to live on I decided to look at my investments to see if they were worthwhile.

I went to my bankers and spoke to one of their executives. I said, ‘I have a lot of shares in various UK companies and I’d like to sell them subject to the shares being worth at least as much as I paid for them. So could you tell me the selling prices before we start filling in forms?’ The executive consulted a newspaper and informed me that all my shares were currently selling at half their original value. As I couldn’t afford such a loss I chose to keep them in the hope that at some time in the future they would return to the price I had paid for them.

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