I have a question for all of us retirees, a simple one. If, in our retirement, we find ourselves with money in the bank, what should we do with it? Simple enough. A number of options present themselves – give it to a deserving cause; leave it to the children or spend it on ourselves /having a good time*. A no brainer you might think. But not so fast.
We do the first, and the kids will get a fair amount eventually when we shuffle off this mortal coil. So maybe we can rule out the first two. So spend it on ourselves? Well even this isn’t easy (or so I thought). We could buy a new car but I have very little interest in new motors when the ones we have work perfectly well even though they are old (more of this in another blog).
Any relatively minor item like a new garden bench we would just go ahead and buy whenever we needed it. Imagine my surprise when up popped on my Facebook page an advert for a new piano. Ridiculously expensive (best part of nine grand) and I actually found myself considering buying it. Considered in the sense of thinking about where would I put it. This wasn’t just some lightweight keyboard the like of which I have bought several times before – altogether lighter and more portable.
No siree, this was a full blown, full size, extremely heavy proper piano **, as you would expect for nearly £9,000. As you can see from the photo and very handsome it looks, as you can see in the photo at the top of this blog. Not actually the piano I had intended to buy (that was going to be a Yamaha for the simple reason that I knew the brand) but in the shop (yes there’s a piano shop near where we live) I liked the sound and feel of this one.
The shop in question had a range of pianos from £3,000 to £9,000 and before I got there I convinced myself and Mrs Summerhouse that I would just buy a ‘cheap’ round about the £3,000 mark. Ha, I was swept away by the sound and appearance of them and before I could say arpeggio I had bought the nine grand version. Slap me with a haddock if I didn’t.
And thereby hangs the problem on spending a lot of money even if we did have it in the bank, I am finding it, two weeks after delivery, very difficult to play, not actually, just mentally. It’s some form of guilt, something about being not worthy or some such rubbish. Certainly I’m not the pianist I once was and in a way, no I don’t deserve this beauty, but that way lies madness. Just enjoy.
I’ll let you know how it all turns out, how this plank of my retirement fits in, if at all. Watch this space.
*The main reason we have money in the bank is that we haven’t been on holiday for the last five years – a combination of Covid and general health has stopped us travelling and all plans to revisit America or visit son in Australia, old friends in New Zealand etc have been shelved it sometimes seems like permanently. Oh and the dogs, the older they get (they’re nearly 13 now) the less inclined we are to leave them for any protracted period of time. In fact that may be the main reason we don’t travel.
**the men who delivered it seemed to find it quite hard work getting it in the house. When I sympathised with them they surprised me by telling me they much preferred delivering pianos to house removals – go figure.