Fordyce Maxwell: 'Were peasants who put their cash under the mattress right after all?'

A MEMORY lingers of a World Cup when the camera closed in on the Saudi Arabian coach as Germany scored the seventh goal of an eventual 8-0 win. Pages of his notebook were a blur as he despairingly leafed through it.

"It looks," said the commentator sympathetically, "as if we're up to about Plan F."

Hands up if the past week of money market mayhem has induced the same feeling about things slightly more important than a football match. Thought so.

No matter how confident you might have been about Plan A and, at a push, Plan B, and notwithstanding the collapse of Northern Rock and your most recent mortgage endowment warning or credit card statement, what did the collapse of Bear Stearns do to your thinking?

Bear what? I know, until a week or so ago I hadn't heard of that big American bank either. But if an organisation like that can be worth $30 a share on a Friday and $2 on Monday, it makes you think. Put another way, it made me think – that and a statement from one of the many fine firms that have made big money from looking after the money of others which showed that our modest investment with them had a paper value of 15% less than a year ago.

Quite how that fitted with their claim of "11 years of continuous growth" was not clear except as an example of positive thinking to rival the late Robert Maxwell or the very present Heather Mills.

Since then the financial bad news has been relentless as the backside – a technical term widely used in agricultural circles, m'lud – has dropped out of so many sectors that had seemed sound investments.

Plan F? Were peasants who put their cash under the mattress right after all to distrust banks? Are those nice people ready to send us a £400,000 Scandinavian lottery win if we pay the administrative costs, any worse than financial advisers who urged us to invest in commercial property?

We didn't, but some have, just as willingly as those who paid £20,000 to someone they didn't know to collect a lottery prize they had never heard of in a competition they hadn't entered. But that's not much more stupid when you get down to it than taking out a Standard Life endowment mortgage in the 1980s.

When the first panic subsides and you accept, as the Saudi coach did when he threw his notebook away, that Plan F won't be much more use than Plan C or Plan Z, it settles the mind. The sun is still shining, plants growing, spring springing. It doesn't cost anything to walk miles in the fresh air, porridge is still only a few pence per plateful, home-made soup not much more and in any case good food is the last thing to cut back on.

There are many choices before that. Apart from the essentials of family, home, food and heating, let's ask every time: Do I need it? Can I afford it? Can I buy it more cheaply somewhere else?

Be honest, we could almost always stop at question one. If not, we might balk at question two. If not, then good luck with the £400,000 coming your way from a Scandinavian lottery.

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