Retirement Planning: Now's the time!

Do you detest or dread that word "retirement"? Well, whether you do or not, retirement is one of those realities of life, something that each person must brace up to. Retirement cannot be wished away, because it is practically impossible to work all ones' life, even in self-employment. Except that life is cut short early by death. If you live to advanced age, there is that point where, biologically, your body will begin to give in to years of toil and the process of natural aging. When one is a bit unlucky, that process of yielding to physical constraints could come prematurely due to physical incapacitation of one form or another. What all this simply says is that one way or another, the day will come when even the strongest man will be unable to actively fend for himself. When that day comes, will you be ready?

The reality is that anyone that truly loves himself will not wish to stretch on until that point where his body refuses to co-operate. Part of how the body system can be helped to transit into graceful aging will be to spare it that sustained flogging, even before it protests. In effect, the healthy thought you should nurse for yourself is that you ease off your labour early enough. Will that mean becoming idle? Not really. There are many ways to stay active without the struggle for basic livelihood, which is the lot of the ill-prepared person. If you have built yourself a comfortable nest egg to take good care of retirement, you can afford other means of maintaining fitness, as much as the age can permit. So, not only should you be interested in comfortable retirement, you should also work for timely retirement.

Paradigm Shift
What is most-needed in that quest for a planned, comfortable retirement life is a change of paradigm:

• never think again of retirement as the concern of those near retirement age;
• don't deceive yourself, even as a young person, into believing that there is too much time at your disposal;
• don't just go on leaving everything to chance: there are tools of personal finance management that can give you reasonable control over the quality of life you will live in retirement.

Early Action Pays Handsomely
Retirement planning is a whole area of personal finance that is focused on how to ensure that life in retirement is on one's terms and in comfort. While various tools for achieving that goal are available, what is most-stridently made is the call to early action. The best guarantee to a retirement life in cool comfort is simply to act early - if possible as soon as one begins to earn income. Starting early to prepare for that date, is, ironically, not too early: you need all the time, especially if you desire to achieve excellent preparation in a painless manner. How does beginning early help your cause?

• starting early is great for the fact that it puts this goal on the front burner as you run through your career. That puts you in the best position to take various initiatives that will accelerate your progress towards the objective. Compare that with someone that fails to realise the need and takes no action, until perhaps too late in the day. Those are the kind of people that will crowd pension payment centers to wait and pray for payments that are not forthcoming;
• taking prompt action puts you immediately in a position to take advantage of the magical power of time and factors like compounding, which are known to exponentially grow investments; starting late denies you this unique multiplier impact, meaning that you achieve far less results than potentially possible;
• beginning early permits a gentler gradient in building the resources you need for the retirement period. What this simply says is that you will be under less pressure and can take it easy and yet be able to achieve very satisfactory results. When you start late, the first challenge is the enormous pressure you undergo in trying to remedy a seemingly bad situation. The second downside is that your best effort, because it cannot benefit sufficiently from the effect of time, will most likely yield limited growth impact.

Make That Choice
The options before each person seem pretty clear:

1. get the best out of your physical conditioning while still strong and take timely steps to provide adequately for the later part of life which will suffer the impact of the rigours of today's activities.
2. do nothing or not much about that period since it's still far.

Common sense as well as experience lend a lot of weight to the first option. After all, who in Nigeria has not witnessed the disgusting experience of those pursuing pension payments under various government institutions and agencies, most of whom suffer untold hardship for payments that are often not available. You blame the government for that shoddy approach to the problem (largely tackled now through the new pension scheme), but never lose sight of the failings of the individuals involved. Many of them seem helpless and easily give out the fact that they made no good provision for this period of their lives, entrusting everything, it would seem, to the meager government pension. For many, that has proved rather too costly, if you consider that quite a number has died under the scotching effect of the sun or out of hunger or untreated ill-health. The wisdom there is to view the matter of retirement planning and provision as serious and begin in good time to tidy up your future. An important step is to discover the tools that can be put to use to achieve that purpose. The time to begin to act, if you want to make life easier, is now.

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