Rodney Hobson - Shares Made Simple: REVISED AND UPDATED 3RD EDITION OF THE NO. 1 BOOK ABOUT THE STOCK MARKET

M ost of us are too busy earning a living to make any money. As long as the day job produces enough income to get by on, why worry?

However, since the global financial crisis in 20078, the odds have become increasingly stacked against the honest toiler. Despite higher levels of employment, pay rises have generally struggled to keep up with rising prices. During 2017, average pay rose by just over 2% while inflation, fuelled by a fall in the value of the pound after the Brexit vote, hit 3%, squeezing real wages by nearly 1%. Such cash as ordinary people could manage to save has attracted pitiful rates of interest, typically as low as 0.1%, in bank sa vings accounts.

Getting on the housing ladder has become an unattainable dream for millennials (those born in the run-up to the year 2000), especially in London. Average UK house prices rose 2.6% in 2017, according to the UKs largest building society, Nationwide, and although that was lower than the 4.5% recorded in 2016 it was still ahead of wage rises.

The price of an average house is now six times average annual pay, double the ratio in the mid-1990s. Home ownership, the main means of wealth creation for postwar generations, has declined from 70% of the population to 62% in the past 15 years and is still falling; for those under 35, only 37% have managed to get a foot on the housing ladder.

The share of national income taken in pay has fallen over the past 50 years from around 55% to just above 50%. In other words, for every pound you earn, you get 50p and your employer gets 50p. Over the years, it is the owners of capital who have made the greatest gains, leaving ordinary mortals in their wake.

In theory, wealth is supposed to trickle down from the rich so that we all share the nations prosperity. Experience has shown that this simply doesnt happen.

One solution could be to give workers a stake in the company they work for. However, there has been little enthusiasm for creating worker shareholders over the years. Only 2 million of the UKs 32 million workers are members of a share scheme. (The John Lewis Partnership, the retail chain owned collectively by its workforce, is perhaps the most famous UK firm with such a scheme but it was implemented in the 1920s.)

But employee ownership is far from the only solution to the problem of workers sharing less and less in the n ations wealth.

There is an answer and it is available to all. It can be implemented right now. You may have even already begun to do it.

Buy shares yourself and not just in the company you work for but in a range of businesses. The revolution in the way major stock exchanges operate since the dawn of the computer age means it is easy and cheap for ordinary people to do so. And the rewards can b e considerable.