When I served as a Blue Helmet, one of those peacekeeping soldiers trudging the Golan Heights in Syria, I was—on paper—a member of the Austrian military. I did five tours there. And before every single deployment, we had to sit through a two-hour sermon from a representative of a large Austrian insurance company, peddling their “specially designed” financial products for soldiers.
The packages were always the same: pension schemes, assorted investment contraptions, and a few other shiny promises—each sprinkled with not-so-subtle hints from the Sergeant Major that “this would be a good thing for you.” The arrangement was simple: a tiny sliver of your wages, neatly skimmed off before you ever saw it.
I never signed a thing. Not once. When asked why, I said that all finance is, at its core, a scam—and I wanted no part of it.Even then, I underestimated just how depraved the finance beast could become.