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THE INSIDE SCOOP ON RETIREMENT By Rick Hoogendoorn
WHEN TO RETIRE Fear of not having enough money is the biggest reason people don’t retire earlier than they do, and sometimes their fears keep them working far longer than necessary. MAUREEN: "Don't wait until you feel that, ‘I'm old and they don't want me. I can't stay.’ That would be so hard on a person. It would for me. To think that I wasn't needed or I was too old for it because then you do feel old. 60, 65 isn't old." HAL: "Well, really, I would try to figure out how to retire earlier. If there is such a thing as reincarnation I'd come back at the same time and do it again but I would retire at 20 if I could. The job I gave up to retire was the most interesting job I ever had in my life. It suited my disposition, but I'd decided the hell with this! This is my life now and I said to other agents that I was gonna retire and they said, 'What do you want to do that for?' and I said, 'If I die, working, I'll come back and haunt every one of you." I said, 'I don't wanna die working.' " PAM: "The deputy minister said to me, 'But you can't retire! You're not even 50!' I said, 'Yes I can'. He said, 'But you'll starve!' I said, 'No I won't'. But I knew I had to go. That's what I'm trying to say to people. Don't stay. There's something else out there for you. And there was. I came here and I got work." GERRY: "The way that I looked at retirement was what was the point, at age 55, in turning down a pension of 70%, and staying on to work for an income of 30%, and continuing to pay income tax on that? So the actual amount of money, you know, take the 70% away which I would have gotten as my pension anyway, and then looking at that 30% and looking at how much income tax would be paid on that 30% as well as on the 70% pension…" RICK: "So it was no longer worth it." GERRY: "Right." RICK: "Was it the right decision." GERRY: "Oh yes." RICK: "Did you retire when you wanted to?" KEN: "Pretty well. I should have retired at 53, at my rank level, but it worked out to be 55." RICK: "Why did you retire at 55 instead of 53?" KEN: "Compulsory release age. I didn't have the option. You can always retire early if you want to and take whatever penalties may go along with it, by way of diminished pension, but I had no reason to do that." PAT: "You see what happened to me, I got to 60 in September last year and I thought, 'If I've got 20 good years I'll be doing very well.' And I don't want to spend any more time at work, and under this stressful environment, doing what I no longer enjoy, because it's boring now and it's too stressful. I want out while my health is still good and I'm still able to do things. That was my biggest reason for getting out. I was ready. I really was. I was so sick of that. I was so bored of the same thing and the constant pressure that was being put on you. I thought 'I don't need this.' You know, I mean, I've damaged my body working there over the years, little by little." RICK: "How has your expectation of retirement matched up, or not matched up with reality?" EARL: "You see people either flee towards something or flee away from something, and if you're fleeing away from something, like I was, you really don't have expectations. You expect things will be better than they are, and if you're asking whether I thought, 'Well I'm going to have all this time to go golfing and so forth', I never thought about that at all. I just thought about, 'Can I make a go of it?'" RICK: "So it was mostly 'get the hell out'?" EARL: "Get the hell out. I've been working there for 35 years. To hell with it! I never thought I would remain not working. I thought I would get another job, but I never did." RICK: "Anything you'd wish you'd known before you retired?" RICHARD: "How wonderful it was gonna be." (laughs giddily) RICK: "Would have done that earlier if you'd known?" RICHARD: "I would have done it earlier. Oh ya!" JOHN: "Retire as soon as you really feel you can, and probably earlier than you think because it's not going to cost you as much as you perhaps think. I suppose I'm lucky in a way in that I do have a fairly good pension. If I was living on RRSPs, with what's going on in the stock market, I'd be a little more hesitant, but that's one advantage of a pension." RICK: "Any reason why you didn't retire earlier?" HAL: "The money. Until I saw that I could have enough income coming in that I could make it then that was fine. So I don't have that grinding problem of living in poverty at my years' end. Like I voluntarily retired, I didn't have to retire at that time." RICK: "In retrospect, could you have retired earlier? Because expenses drop down?" HAL: "Well they do in a sense, but it depends what you do too. If you're out for lunch you can spend that money. A lot of things happen. When I could see that I was able to retire, that's when I did it." The Reporter’s Notebook How will you know when the time is right for you? As Earl alludes to, will you be moving toward what you want, or away from what you don’t want? If you are just wanting to quit what you don’t like doing, how much thought is going into creating the retirement and the future you want to have?
Financial planning, estate planning, retirement planning, insurance planning, tax planning, insurance products, segregated funds, and tax preparation services mentioned herein are offered through Cheri Crause & Associates Inc. . |
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Cheri Crause, Rick Hoogendoorn, Richard and
Brenda Jacques
copyright
2008 Cheri Crause
& Associates Inc.
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