Retirement

What is retirement?

For many it is completion of stipulated age(55,58  or 60 as if the case may be). For most, it is imposed. After retirement, a person suddenly finds himself without a regular job. If this period is not managed well, slowly a retired person feels that his identity is lost and lethargy sets in. I saw people die due to this inactivity.

Is this the only way.

Before contemplating that lets think of a question. Is retirement an imposed incident. In other words, can one retire on his own without someone tell him to go.

To start with, let us see why a person needs a job. A job is a source of regular income for a person. Only for a few (entrepreneurs) it is a passion. But for most it is a drudgery and they do a job as a source of income only.

If a source of income is available, meeting the monthly expenses, one does not need a job for security. There may be other needs like societal status and belongingness. They have to be addressed separately and individually.

The question is Can one accumulate a corpus which can give enough periodic yield to meet one’s regular monetary requirements?

This though difficult, is possible.

For this one needs to have a fairly good estimate of periodic requirement. Say monthly requirement is X. Yearly requirement will be 12X. This means, if one gets 12X amount after all costs and taxes, one will not need a job.

But taxes and costs need to be paid. Hence the corpus should yield 12 + K, where K is taxes + costs on 12X.

Will continue this discussion further in subsequent posts.

Learnings

“Tough times never last but tough people do”. This is a saying one hears often. But is it true?
When one is not going through rough times, one tends to believe the saying and one may preach it too. But when one is in tough times, one finds it difficult to stomach this fact. Many try to avoid the situation if possible.

But often, escaping is not possible and may not be an option. In such case what can one do?
From a recent personal experience, I have some observations on coping up.

1.      Take a close look at the issue. The issue may not be as grave as it may seem. With some innovative thinking, most of the perceived hurdles may be overcome and with some effort on can complete 80-90% of the task. This is better than not doing anything at all.

2.      Give it time. Discuss/negotiate to buy some time. Our brain is wonderful instrument and in times of peace, it finds ingenious solutions to some tough problems.

3.      Contemplate pros and cons and check if completion of such a laborious/time consuming task is really worth the effort. Take a decision after analyzing thoroughly.

Some of these helped me in coping with the situation. See if they are useful to you.

Interesting website for kids

I chanced upon this website yesterday. It is makemegenious.com.

In this, many science concepts were explained through animation.

The topics are graded grade wise for easy search.

In addition to science videos, there are other sections like cool facts, Educational power points and even jokes for kids.

It is a useful resource for kids.