{"id":71916,"date":"2025-02-06T17:51:06","date_gmt":"2025-02-06T17:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/business\/investing\/retirement-investing-today-obfuscation\/"},"modified":"2025-02-06T17:51:06","modified_gmt":"2025-02-06T17:51:06","slug":"retirement-investing-today-obfuscation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=71916","title":{"rendered":"Retirement Investing Today: Obfuscation"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\nI\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s the COVID-19 lockdown affecting me, or whether this is really a thing, but over the past month or so I\u2019ve started to really notice companies stretching their take on integrity.\u00a0 Maybe I was just in a bubble before but for me if you don\u2019t have integrity I don\u2019t want to be anywhere near you.\u00a0 Let\u2019s look at a few examples that I\u2019ve personally come across.<\/p>\n

BT this week published their 4th quarter and year end results.\u00a0 Within that were these pearls of wisdom – “In order to deal with the potential consequences of Covid-19, allow us to invest in FTTP and 5G, and to fund the major 5-year modernisation programme, we have also taken the difficult decision to suspend the dividend until 2022 and re-base thereafter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now I know that lots of businesses are currently doing it tough but I just cannot see how BT can be worse off because of COVID-19 given we are currently in a world where the majority of communication can only be done via telephone or electronic data transfer.\u00a0 My view, without having any knowledge of BT, is that the COVID-19 situation is just obfuscation from the fact that the board can\u2019t figure out how to set pricing and manage their cost base to enable investment to stay competitive and give some cash back to the owners of the business.<\/p>\n

I also take issue with term \u201cre-base\u201d.\u00a0 It\u2019s cut or reduce.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never heard anybody say I\u2019m going to \u201cre-base\u201d my grocery bill.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, other than in my FTSE100 tracker, I don\u2019t own BT.<\/p>\n

RateSetter is another.\u00a0 When I first started investing with them they had products called 3 Year, 1 Year and Monthly.\u00a0 Since then they\u2019ve moved away from that model and amongst a few new products introduced a product called \u201cAccess\u201d.<\/p>\n

Given the current climate it\u2019s no secret that P2P lenders are doing it tough.\u00a0 I can accept that it\u2019s so tough that lenders like me might start taking capital losses or even lose the majority of it.\u00a0 After all with peer-to-peer it\u2019s always stated that \u201ccapital is at risk\u201d.<\/p>\n

The bit I can\u2019t accept is the obfuscation and RateSetter have two nice examples:<\/p>\n