Readers! You give them an inch, and they take a column. Two letters this week. One from a person writing as me, the other an apology from the actual me for not making clear enough a couple of weeks ago how direct debits in Britain can be detrimental to your economic health.

The first letter came from a senior insurance executive whom I count as a friend. Unhappy, it seems, with last week's answer in this space to the question "How much is enough", he contributed a column that he proposed I file under my name.

"In my column last week," the reader suggested I write, "you may have noticed that I clumsily avoided a direct answer to the question asked ? that is, how much is enough for retirement. My motivation was to avoid litigation, but I realise that the effect of my reticence was a column of somewhat questionable relevance. This week I hope to make amends."

He (or I) went on to discuss how I had ignored the Bermuda pension in answering the question of how much is enough. I plead guilty as charged: a full Bermuda pension, I believe, is about $900 a month, plus whatever the reader who asked the question might have stashed away in his private pension plan since its introduction in 2000. Few could retire in any comfort on whatever all that amounts to.

I have always preferred to ignore any contribution to retirement well-being from government pensions, here or anywhere else. I have recently discovered that I will be entitled to a lump sum from the Bermuda Government on turning 65, having worked for umpteen years here, but who is to say that I'll get it? Not counting one's chickens before they are legislated away is always a prudent course of action.

Anyway, sorry to my friend who thought I had avoided the answer as to how much is enough. Just this week, I have been in London, looking at apartments, and the correct answer there, as in Bermuda, is that no amount is enough to get into the real estate game.

@EDITRULE:

Speaking of apologies: two weeks ago, I wrote that a direct debit instruction issued by my brother had permitted an insurance company to impute a legally binding "loan agreement" to him and then deem him to have broken it when he cancelled the direct debit instruction.

A reader wrote as follows: "There is no way a company can set up a loan agreement without your consent! There was obviously a mix-up somewhere. For there to be a loan agreement, there has to be (1) an agreement and (2) a loan."

I did not make myself clear, for which I apologise. In the UK, a company in whose favour you issue a direct debit instruction may indeed set up a loan agreement without your consent. There does not have to be what you or I would call an agreement, nor what you or I would call a loan.

Direct debit enables the payee to refer collectively to payments under an annual contract as "a loan". It does not have to show you the loan agreement, nor are you required to sign it to be party to it. The payee may automatically declare you in default of the loan, whether you know you have one or not, if you cancel the policy without meeting the requirements of the payee.

The foregoing is not a mistake. It was my brother's experience. He signed a direct debit instruction for some monthly payments on an insurance policy. The company renewed the policy without telling him, and internally referred to his 12 monthly payments, in total, as a loan. The company then issued to its file a loan agreement that to this day he has never seen, which is legally binding on him. That was the point of the article, that you should be aware that, despite what you or I would think of as common sense, direct debits allow a payee to invent whatever fiction best suits him, and then enforce it in law on the payer.

My brother appealed to the Ombudsman for Insurance, who has the final word in such matters. The Ombudsman ruled that the insurance company was entirely within its rights to act in this fashion ("because of the direct debit instruction") and my brother was bound by a contract he didn't know existed until he stopped it ? which he also, it transpired, did not have the right to do. When you grant a direct debit, you can forego the right to terminate it without the approval of the payee, leaving you paying until such time as the payee decides he has had enough of your money.

This all sounds unutterably stupid and wrong, but it is not. I hope this makes it easier to understand, since few British companies will any longer accept a standing order, over which the payer retains control. Almost all payees insist on a direct debit mandate, for reasons that should be plain from the foregoing.