The Anonymous Widower

The Magic Pudding

One of C’s favourite books was the Magic Pudding. This is a description from Wikipedia.

The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff is an Australian children’s book written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay. It is a comic fantasy, and a classic of Australian children’s literature.

The story is set in Australia with humans mixing with anthropomorphic animals. It tells of a magic pudding which, no matter how often it is eaten, always reforms in order to be eaten again. It is owned by three companions who must defend it against Pudding Thieves who want it for themselves.

It had been published in 1918, but she had come across the book, when she was a mother’s help to a family in Norfolk. She read it to our three boys.

When I sold out from Metier, I put some money for safe keeping into a fund managed by TA Associates in Boston. The aim was that in a few years time, it would all be liquidated and the money returned for C’s pension fund.

But other things didn’t work out too well, due to a recommended investment in an office block in Bsasingstoke, which lost us about nine million and nearly everything else as well.

However,  we kept going on our earnings, with a bit of help from the fund in Boston, until an investment I’d made, which everybody else said was worthless, paid most of the money I’d lost back.

The fund in Boston had been a good investment and I made a decent return, when everything was liquidated. But then the fun started, as some of their investments in the category of living dead started showing signs of life and for perhaps we had income from a fund that supposedly had been fully distributed.

C and myself nicknamed the fund the Magic Pudding, especially after we got a cheque for several tens of thousands of dollars.

Eventually, it all came to an end and C and myself were back on an even keel financially. So we sent the fund managers a copy of the book in thanks.

It was appreciated and we all parted company on the best of relations.

I have been looking since then for another Magic Pudding investment.

In an ideal world, you could put a sum of money into a bank account and you can get out a sum every so often, that you need for emergencies, like a new boiler or a holiday for your partner on a big birthday.

You would also want the capital sum to stay intact.

But to do this with a bank, you need a decent interest rate. So you can’t!

I have a sum invested in Zopa, which is around a hundred thousand. This has been built up over the last six years, by putting any spare money into the account. I started it with the money I got from selling C’s Porsche and now I top it up each month with what I have left over from my pension after I’ve paid all my bills. Typically, this sum is a thousand or so each month.

Zopa is very much a rolling fund and in addition to the interest each month, you get a proportion of capital of your micro loans repaid.

So if I look at the lsast couple of years, I usually get something like five percent of my total investment available each month.

If I don’t need any money in a particular month, the money goes back into the pot for reinvestment.

Obviously, the account doesn’t turn into a Magic Pudding Investment, until it has been running for a few years, when a proportion of your micro loans start to mature.

I would never recommend anybody to jump into peer-to-peer lending. But if you are unhappy with what your bank pays, then you should perhaps research some of long established peer-to-peer lending companies of which Zopa is one.

Think of the process of choosing a peer-to-peer lender as as you would choose a new car or house. You pick one that suits your lifestyle.

June 28, 2014 - Posted by AnonW | Finance | Books, Zopa