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.