“The biggest asset you have is your earning capacity, and that depends entirely on your attitude.”
- Ben Feldman
How important is it to make more than adequate provision for retirement? How often do we see senior citizens still scrounging around to eke a survival-level existence? One elderly person summarised bitterly his situation: ''If there is no money to retire, you may as well expire''.
The average man-in-the-street may feel that between some savings, CPF and the family, retirement is not a serious problem. He may even say: ''I have enough for retirement''. The unsetting question is: ''For how long do you plan to retire?''
This is a question that is not easily answered. Nobody knows for how long one will retire! Its correct to work hard all your life. Its prudent to work smart and let life insurance help you answer this question in the affirmative: ''Why not arrange your affairs so that working after age 62 or 67 is optional?''
One commonly quoted guide is to consider that you should have 70% of our last drawn income to live on in your retirement. Even though most of the large ticket items would have been paid for, provision for escalating cost of living must be uppermost in mind.
Today, if a person is alive at 60, he has a very good chance of living till 80 or 83 (if a woman). Before you retire, you think it will be 90% about money and 10% of what you do. When you've become an ''active retiree'', its actually 10% about the money and 90% about what to do! If retirement is adequately planned for, you can adopt Richard Bolles'colourful prose and instead call it ''the fourth movement in the symphony of our lives''.
Recall: People who retire with money have decisions. People who retire without money have problems.
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