Welcome Weny and Sweetlip, glad to have another couple of fellow Aussies on board.
Thanks Mate.
This skills shortage that the Australian goverment keeps bleating about, I would like to know where it is? I think the simple truth is so many of us head overseas as skilled workers are so poorly paid in Australia. The skills shortage seems to be in the areas of nurses and tradies rather than at higher levels.
That is exactly the case. My perspective is that Aussie governments of both persuasions have, for years, encouraged people to stay at school longer and to fund more university places for the sole purpose of short term reductions in unemployment statistics, and the benefit of this towards re-election.
I left school at 15 and did trade training and for the life of me, I don't understand why a kid has to stay at school until 17 or 18 to enter a trade. Worst still, trade training was made less popular in lieu of university courses
producing graduates in topics like movie making and other glamour soft options that attract gullible teenagers brought up on "Neighbours" or "Home and Away" but for whom negligible jobs exist for those qualifications.
I recall that universities liked cramming their halls with those low cost useless courses so that they would receive lots of government funding which could be used to fund more capital intensive courses like engineering or medicine.
The net result is that we have a glut of people with useless degrees who end up working in call centres, the battery hen factories of the millenium, and a shortage of people who know how to repack a wheel bearing on a low loader or change a tap washer.
BTW, although leaving school at 15, I subsequently studied for matriculation at night school and went on to get an engineering degree and an MBA but my sentiments remain about delaying youngsters earning a living by keeping them at school too long and educating them with useless degrees. This country needs some macro capacity planning of its skills base.
however the allocated pension they are trying to steer everyone towards is along the annuities line. I'm not sure about the need to have a financial planner on your team to steer you through the complexities of superannuation, I think this is a bit of a con perpetuated by the financial planners to make people believe it is all too hard for them to understand thereby giving them an never ending stream of commission.
I use a financial Planner who is tied to my industry (the best kind) superannuation fund thus I incur no incremental fees nor trailing commissions. However, when I retired at 56, and thinking that I was so very well read on superannuation matters, I was surprised at what he could do for me in relation to structuring my affairs so that even though I am below the tax free age of sixty, I am not paying any tax at all. My allocated pension gives me the minimum legislated 4% drawdown and I have to say that I could not spend that amount of money each year in a fit so I am recontributing most of it. His plan also awoke me to how I might structure things to improve the situation of my estate and that of my wife when we pass on and leave our bundle to the kids.
Having said that, I still make the decisions on my investments and indeed, I chose to ignore his advice on allocation mix at the time (June, 2007) because ( and you may not believe this!) I was concerned at how the easy credit flowing around the planet might cause the share market to tank. This is especially because the Aussie share market has ramped up unnaturally over the past four years and looks remarkably like what it did pre-1987. My concerns about world-wide easy credit had nothing to do with US sub-prime loans though. I had never heard of these at the time. My concern was about credit management in China. At this stage, my own gut feel on asset allocation has proved itself but nonetheless, my financial planner (not to be confused with "financial guru by any stretch of the imagination - after all, he is working for a salary, isn't he?!) has served me well, especially in understanding the nuances of taxation as applied to superannuation.
My real hope now is that the USA drops into recession quickly so that the world share markets can all tank and we can get it over and done with quickly and those of us holding lots of money in cash funds can reallocate that into a bottomed out share market. What I fear though is that the decline in the markets will be gradual over the next couple of years as the shakier companies, affected by the sub-prime mess, fall over one at a time when loans are due for refinancing etc. eg Centro in Australia which lost 70%+ of its value overnight last week.