Wednesday, June 06, 2007
“Because it's never to early to plan for retirement”
Today, Bunny dragged me along to a retirement money management seminar being held at the upscale Boca Raton restaurant Pete's (which I've always confused with Pete Rose's Ballpark Café which is just down the street. The difference? You don't have to take out a second mortgage to eat at Pete Rose's). She received an invite over a week ago, and since it included a free dinner ... Spend an hour listening to a financial pitch to eat a gourmet dinner?
If there's one thing I learned in college, it's “never turn down free food.”
The pitch wasn't that bad actually, much less intensive than the web seminar we attended a month ago, but I do have to wonder about some of the investment programs presented—100% upside, no downside, and some with a payout of 110%? The money has to come from somewhere, and my gut feeling is that it comes from the expansionist money policy the Fed promotes by keeping interest rates dangerously low and inflating the money supply while severely underreporting inflation (so let's see—keep interest rates low and crater the dollar overseas, or strengthen it by increasing interest rates but risk the already shaky mortgage industry and cratering our economy domestically).
But I'm not an economist, nor an accountant, so what do I know?
Anyway, the food was quite good, although Bunny felt that the cinnamon overpowered the subtle flavor of the sweet potatoes (while personally, I felt the cinnamon masked the flavor of the sweet potatoes enough to make them palatable, but then again, I'm not a fan of sweet potatoes). The meal was definitely worth the hour pitch for the financial company offering the seminar.