Who’s Zoomin’ Who

Today has basically been a Zoom meeting with our IFA in the morning, then weekly shopping in the afternoon.
And, it has to be said, the shopping went a lot more smoothly than the meeting! This time last year, we had a short meeting with our IFA by phone. Covid had caused all the markets to plummet so we just agreed to put everything on hold and see what the situation was in twelve months time.
Those twelve months have now passed and we have all become familiar with Zoom, so decided to use that technology for today’s meeting. Unfortunately, knowing how to use the system is not quite the same as actually pressing the right buttons! When we started I could not get any sound and it took a good few minutes before I realised I hadn’t actually turned the speakers on - D’oh!
Once we actually had sound, we then realised we were having latency problems as the sound did not match the vision. At our end we switched from my PC to Mrs C’s Mac (it’s nearer the WiFi booster), and our IFA told her teenage son to turn off all his devices which were robbing her bandwidth! Ah, the joys of working from home in the school holidays.
These actions seemed to put things right and we were able to converse without “satellite delay” rendering it impossible. By the time we’d actually got up and running properly though, we were running out of time on the original meeting so a new one had to be hastily arranged. Thankfully, that worked and we were finally able to have the discussion that we should have had last year! The good news is that the markets have more than recovered so we are finally able to proceed with drawing down a bit more in the way of pensions. Should provide a welcome boost to our income, though there still isn’t anything to spend it on!!
Our IFA neatly dodged the question of should we move house or not (we were hoping someone else could make the decision for us) and merely confirmed the funds would be available in good time if we did wish to proceed.
Perhaps when our next review is due, we might actually be able to meet up in person - I certainly hope so.