This week, a return to basics. The goal here is not necessarily to attain great wealth in your lifetime, but to build, over the years, a degree of financial security that will help to guarantee that you spend your declining years with what you need, or better still, what you want.

You'll need a steady source of income. You have a steady stream of expenses already, just being alive. Shelter, food, a social life: all these cost money. Most of us cover these items, or should, with a job. Or, if you're self-employed, with a business. Or, if you inherit or somehow make a good deal of money, from investments. Probably your biggest asset for much of your life will be your future income.

As you grow older, you'll need financial reserves. Big-ticket items will come at you all the time. In the first instance, that's why you save money. If you lose a job, you may need savings to tide you over until you find another. Car repairs are expensive. Accidents happen. You will want your children to go to college, after you have spent a fortune getting them to college age. All these expenses have to be met while you are setting money aside for old age.

You should protect yourself against serious problems, by buying insurance. You will decide which risks you want to carry yourself, and which you would like to pass off to someone else. You will value your life, your family, health, the ability to earn an income, and your possessions; all carry risks that could wipe out your savings. How many of these risks you insure away and in what quantities, are important decisions you will make as you go along.

You need to move ahead of the race fairly constantly. Just keeping up isn't going to be good enough, in terms of your savings. A year in which your savings stand still is in truth a year in which they lose buying power. Inflation eats away at savings, so the idea is to have more at the end of each year than you had a year earlier, for most if not all the years of your working life.

A plan for annual savings is often the easiest way to achieve the consistency necessary to let you meet your goals. Planning can lead to budgeting; both add discipline and will enable you to break down a seemingly huge effort into a more manageable process.

Start by planning the things you want to achieve. Make a list. Items will fall into categories naturally enough: must have, really want, less important. Add in whatever you think you need to retire on, and you'll have an idea of how much to save over your working life. You can also prioritise your goals, an exercise that will help you clarify what you want in life.

As you build savings, what they earn for you will increase. You, or someone, will have to manage your savings by building them into a collection of investments, called a portfolio.

If you work regularly enough, you will earn a pension. It almost certainly won't meet your retirement expenses, but it will help.

People ask me: why bother to save? They doubt they will achieve sufficient savings to make a difference. The answer is: whatever they save is better than nothing.

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Why do so many of my e-mails end up in other people's spam? Why did one e-mail I sent last week come back to me marked "Undeliverable: Dangerous domain"? What evil is afoot in the e-world that makes sending e-mail from Bermuda such a hit-and-miss effort? Answers please.

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A hair product called "Touch of Gray" now allows geezers to keep a little gray hair when they dye the rest of it. This is to counteract the Ronald Reagan effect, in which the octogenarian's hair was the darkest shade of black, which I'm told is 48.

Touch of Gray's appalling advertising slogan, aimed at former hippies, says: "Welcome to the summer of life".

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A report was issued this week into the 1998 shooting death of a citizen in his bed by the British police, who were acting on bad information. The technique they chose to use was to storm in and shoot the poor, innocent fellow to death as he lay naked in his bed. Obviously, it's better to have your facts right when you indulge in that kind of behaviour.

My question is this: why, according to the BBC, is the "high-risk" approach of shooting first and asking questions later known as "the Bermuda method"?

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Finally this, from a British newspaper, The Sunday Times, on April 13, headlined: "Pirates can claim UK asylum":

"The Royal Navy, once the scourge of brigands on the high seas, has been told by the Foreign Office not to detain pirates because doing so may breach their human rights."

The rules appear to be: if you are a pirate, you go scot free. Innocent people, however, must be shot and killed. You can't make this stuff up.