The Retirement Newsletter: Happy Halloween — welcome to a special spooky edition
Issue Number: -65 — a spooktacular edition
Welcome
Welcome to issue -65 – the Halloween edition – or should that be the Spooktacular edition? Yes, sorry about that.
This week, I will look at Halloween in the UK and comment on what is going on in UK politics and how the shenanigans at Westminster are impacting my pension pots.
Halloween
When I was a kid, Halloween was a minor blip on my radar on the way to the more important ‘celebration’ of Guy Fawkes’s night.
Guy Fawkes or Bonfire night
If you are unfamiliar with Guy Fawkes night, or as it is also known, Bonfire Night, it is on the 5th of November, and as a kid in the UK, it was a big deal. You can find out more about Guy Fawkes Night over at Wikipedia.
Guy Fawkes’s night falls on the 5th of November and is a celebration of the failure of Guy Fawkes to assassinate the King and his parliament in the UK on the 5th of November 1605.
In 1605, Guy Fawkes and several other people that no one seems to remember tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Guy Fawkes was captured under the Houses of Parliament while guarding the gunpowder — hence the other name for the event, the Gunpowder Plot. Guy, and his fellow co-conspirators, were captured, tortured and executed.
The celebration of the failure of the Gun Powder Plot was passed into law a year later in 1606, and the law was repealed in 1859. The plot’s failure was officially sanctioned as a Thanksgiving day in the UK.
As a kid, we used to have family and neighbourhood celebrations. We would buy fireworks from the local shops (I can still remember the smell of the firework counter in the local toy shop), build a bonfire in the garden, put an effigy of Guy Fawkes on the top, and set fire to it. (When you think about it, what was that teaching us kids?)
As the fire burnt, we would let off the fireworks, drink hot drinks, and eat sausage rolls and other snacks. It was a real party.
Guy Fawkes night was also the busiest night of the year for the fire brigade and the accident emergency departments at hospitals. The fire brigade was busy putting out accidental fires. AnE was busy treating burns and lost fingers caused by the fireworks.
The ‘family’ Guy Fawkes parties have been replaced with large professional parties with huge bonfires and firework displays. And this may be why Halloween has now become big in the UK. It is replacing Bonfire Night as it falls at the same time and is (overall) safer. Plus, local shops get to sell tons of Halloween stuff.
Halloween or All Hallows' Evening (Hallowe’en)
When I was young, Halloween didn’t feature as a ‘holiday’. There would be some minor celebrations, my parent might go to a local Halloween dance, but that was it. You would never see anything like this, which I saw on a recent walk:
We didn’t do pumpkin carving, we didn’t dress up, we didn’t decorate our houses, and we didn’t do ‘trick or treat’. All that happened in the US.
When I lived in the US, I found Halloween a bit weird.
There was this issue of the celebration of ghosts and witches — and we know how well the US used to tolerate witches (see Salem witch trials). And I was surprised, given the puritanical nature of New England — where I lived, that such a celebration as Halloween was allowed.
Yes, I am aware of the connection between Halloween or All Hallows' Evening and the celebration of All Saints' Day on the 1st of November. But, given how religion is expressed in the States, I was surprised that Halloween was so popular.
When I lived in the US, I went to Halloween parties and carved pumpkins. My American friends found my pumpkin carving funny, as I lacked experience and ‘carved like a young child’.
I never went trick or treating, but I enjoyed seeing the local kids dressed up and out with their parents. I saw some great costumes.
I am still not into Halloween, and now that I am back in the UK, I won’t be carving any pumpkins. On the 31st of October, I will turn off my lounge lights and pretend not to be in. That is now my annual Halloween celebration.
If you want to know more about Halloween, have a look at Wikipedia.
Money
I am not a financial advisor. I am writing about what I have read over the years about money and preparing to retire. This is not financial advice.
They say that a week is a long time in politics. Currently, in the UK, seven hours is a long time in politics.
In Issue -66 — Are you a Boomerist?, I commented on how the recent change in government in the UK had seriously impacted my pension pot. At the time, we had just had a change in the Chancellor of the Exchequer, hoping that the change and the cancelling of the mini-Budget would stabilise the markets. Well, it kind of worked.
Over the last week, I've seen my pension pots recover some of their lost ground, but they still have not returned to the original value of the investment. Hopefully, they will. Then, at the end of the week, the prime minister resigned, and Liza Truss became the UK’s shortest-serving Prime Minister at 45 days.
Supposedly, we will have a new Prime Minister in place in time for issue -64 of this newsletter, which is next week.
This will mean that we will have had three Prime Ministers in a year. And I did wonder if this has ever happened before. Luckily for me, there are some very knowledgeable historians around, and Dan Snow tweeted:
“Don’t want to alarm anyone but the last time we had three Prime Ministers in a year was 1886. And two of them were the same person. A rotund Conservative with some wild hair.
(Lord Salisbury)” — Dan Snow, 4:11 pm, Oct 20, 2022
And they were:
Robert Cecil, 3rd marquess of Salisbury (1885–86; 1st time as Prime Minister)
William Ewart Gladstone (1886; 3rd time as Prime Minister)
Robert Cecil, 3rd marquess of Salisbury (1886–92; 2nd time as Prime Minister)
When I saw Dan’s tweet, I thought it was very amusing. Then I heard Boris Johnson was flying back early from his holiday in the Caribbean as he might stand in the contest to become Leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister —Could Boris Johnson really make a comeback? He has only been out of office for six weeks. Dan might be right.
Anyway, I wonder what the next week will bring and whether my pension pots will recover.
Please note I am not a financial advisor. I am writing about what I have read over the years about money and preparing to retire. This is not financial advice.
Useful links
Some useful links related to this week’s newsletter:
Next week
Next week, in issue -65, I ask — Have we got retirement wrong?
Thanks
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Until next time,
Nick
PS, If you have something you would like to contribute to the newsletter — a story, advice, anything — please get in touch.
Please note: I am not a financial advisor. When I am writing about money and financial matters, it is based on things I have read over the years about money and preparing to retire. IT IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.