Retirement: A Must - 1

When I see the aged begging on the road, especially in traffic my heart breaks, and the question that readily comes to mind is ‘what happened to them while they were in their prime?’ I am not judging their condition, but rather taking a thought to my own life that after all the years I have invested in my career or business I will not grow up and lack the basic things of life (Housing, clothing and food) at the least.

Retirement is one of the topic we least talk about in business and work circle, but it is a reality we will all have to face someday soon. Every time you hear the word “Happy Birthday”, one of the things coded in it is the fact that you are getting older, and with growing older moving an inch closer to retirement.

As you know this blog is majorly about personal finance and that is the angle with which we want to consider retirement.

Retirement is defined as a withdrawal from one’s occupation or position, especially upon reaching a certain age. Age compels us to retire, even when we have the ability to work. This is a wake-up call for us. As we grow older on a daily basis, we should know that we all have career cycle, which is divided into stages - The Start point (which I want to call Career Birth), Career Growth, Career Maturity and Career Decline. Time is a major factor in this equation, no matter how lucrative a career is, it will decline one day and we all need to prepare ourselves for it, so that we are not caught unawares. Retirement plan simply mean a preparation stage towards our retirement season, securing the basics of life (Housing, clothing and shelter) in our old age. A great retirement plan is based on a solid foundation of a well-planned savings and investments lifestyle and one major key to this is, embracing the concept that you will have to retire one day even if you work for yourself as an entrepreneur or you are in a paid employment.

Let us look at some pitfalls of retirement and retirement plan:

a)      Planning On Children As A Retirement Plan: In as much as we believe that we have labored hard, spending our life savings raising this children or child, it is very wrong to put all our hopes in them as it has been proven over time that even when they want to meet your needs, they have their numerous needs too and that of other dependents to attend to.

b)      Working With Fate: People working on fate do not plan, a popular adage says “people who fail to plan has already planned to fail’’

c)       Failing To Belief In Retirement Reality, some set of people live in denial, and thinking that they will never retire, so no plan whatsoever is in place, and when they have the plan in place they do not know anything about it, for example, do you know your retirement RSA account number and account balance?  (we will discuss more on this in our next post)

d)      Retirement Planning Procrastinations: procrastination they say is a thief of time, the truth is I am older than I was when I started writing this post, and I do not need to procrastinate on my actions as it pertains to retirement.

We will continue from here in our next post as we will go deeper into retirement and retirement plan and also enlighten ourselves on the Nigeria Pension scheme and more.

Refer this blog to your FFF (Friends, Family and Foes) stay on top of your finances as we move closer to achieving our personal finance goals! I am your personal finance coach Babatunde Ayorinde (Follower me on twitter @pistis03)