If money could talk, it would say goodbye.

The sad thing is, it's not really peoples' own fault that they lost their money.

I was just discussing with my mom about the financial screw-up. People losing their life savings and retirement funds through minibonds and the stock market crash. And i was wondering, even if you can get peoples' money back, can you ever regain their trust/confidence?

It's going to take a while for the economy to recover. Probably even longer for reputations and confidence. But i'm not really going to talk about it on such a macro scale.

I really feel for those people who have innocently lost all their life savings overnight. By innocently, i mean those who didn't actively decide to invest. Unlike those who trade equities and were prepared to take high risks [so they should be prepared to lose a lot, although i'm not saying that they deserve it], these people managed to lose all their money through what they thought were low-risk products.

I used to joke with my poly friends that after we had gone through our module on personal financial planning, we felt much poorer. Because from that, we realised how difficult it is to earn and keep money.

Imagine, just after you manage to pay off all your debts around your 40's [yes, normal people will have debts unless you're from a rich family in the first place] and start to accumulate some savings for a rainy day, some supposedly risk-free product comes along and helps to lose it all for you.

Not fun.

Anybody still wanna trust the big banks? Then again, it's not really like we have a choice.