Given the current crisis in the financial market and I the only one who wants to go and find all the old posts about ...

[pagwatch]

... getting into a top school so that you can get great qualifications and be a banker or commodities dealer or Money broker.

My 6yo DD was watching tele and doing gym practice. She seems suited as most of them seem to watch the screen and then bend over and kiss their own asses goodbye....

Do they do anything other than what everyone else is doing. Is it a profession or an excercise in mass hysteria?

[NorkyButNice]

Not sure what you mean by "Do they do anything other than what everyone else is doing"?

I don't think the current financial crisis makes investment banking any less a decent job to aspire to - by the time people who are choosing schools now are graduating the markets will be as strong as ever and there will still be plenty of highly paid jobs.

[LadyMuck]

I know a number of investment bankers, and not so many who are unemployed even yet. They're not recruiting so now wouldn't be a good time to try and get into investment banking, but much of the reduction in numbers is more in the line of natural wastage.

Or perhaps I only know successful ones...

[sitdownpleasegeorge]

I'd also like to dig out the thread where a poster said that trying to reduce your mortgage over time wasn't the best thing to have done as given the way the market had gone over the last 10 years the clever people had constantly remortgaged to the max as property values went up, to buy more property - or something like that.

I posted that "we are all wise with hindsight" and no-one knew the market would go up and up like it did over the last 10 years.

I feel much better now that I kept up with our policy of paying chunks off the mortgage as and when we could. We have no need to remortgage and even if we did need some extra funds we still have £100,000+ equity in our main home even after allowing for a potential 30-40% drop in house prices.

Our shares will bounce back in value before we retire despite the best efforts of a seedy deal riven financial sector in the U.S./U.K.

I am a little at anyone now suffering because they didn't have a rainy day fund as some of my brother's friends were big earners but lived life to the full, their families outgoings being more or less equal to the funds coming in. They always had plenty of the latest season's clothes as did the children, holidays, cars, leisure pursuits all funded from the income with no rainy day fund being set up. Forget money tied up in company stock/investments, these people work(ed) in finance, have they never heard of instant access cash savings funds (1st £35,000 of which safeguarded by the government) to tide the family over in a crisis. It seems they took risks with everyone's financial security including their own.

Smug aren't I. No, just vindicated in my old fashioned belief in always having a rainy day fund to dip into even if you earn ridiculous amounts of money. It's at the other end of the scale where people simply can't spare even their loose change to start a savings fund that the sympathy is due, not for the middle class, city banking fraternity.

[findtheriver]