Strategies for planned retirement
My 6-step agenda to planned retirement, which I enumerated here last week, look simple on paper. But I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not so when it comes to implementing it. That is why I’ve decided to take each one of them and describe what needs to be done to get the desired result.
I start with the first one which is, Decide today that you will not be a liability to the people around you in your old age.
How do you go about implementing this? There are three keywords in this simple but powerful statement. They are: decide, liability and old age. If you analyze each one of them carefully, you’ll get a clear picture of what the statement means.
Decision, according to a dictionary, is a position, or opinion or judgment reached after consideration; the act of making up your mind about something. With this explanation, you come to understand that you have to “make up your mind” about not becoming a liability to others in your old age.
So then what is liability? It is something that holds you or someone back; a debt that you’re obliged to pay. Under the subject we are discussing, being a liability means becoming so useless that you depend totally on others for every basic necessity of life like food, shelter and clothing.
No, this does not include someone who is sick. A sick person, no matter how intelligent or wealthy, cannot take care of himself. Someone has to nurse him. But I’m talking of a healthy man who can consume a bowl of jollof rice and wash it down with soft drink and even belch after wiping off the plate with his tongue.
You know the type. He’s always having a new plan. Like wanting to start a small business that can be bringing him steady money but the only thing holding him up is the capital to start it. When someone gives him the capital, he disappears from the scene for sometime.
When he emerges again, he has a new story. The business went belly up. Or he was duped. Or there were too many competitors. He says to you, “It was as if they were waiting for me to start. As soon as I opened shop, they rushed in and ‘spoilt the business’.”
Unless you or someone gives him another hand-out, he remains an embarrassment to you, an eye-sore. That is the kind of liability that I’m talking about. May GOD forbid you or your daughter getting married to such a person.
If, unfortunately, you’re married to such a man, and you can work, you’ve legally become a slave in your home, whether you know it or not. This man will feed off you and abuse you if he’s the worst type.
I’ve gone to this extent to describe what I mean by liability so that you know exactly what I’m talking about. So let’s look at the other keyword phrase: old age. According to a dictionary, this is the last period of human life, now often considered to be the years after 65.
Age 65. Think about it. Isn’t it a terrible thing to be a liability at that age? To be totally helpless and unable to provide those basic necessities of life that we mentioned earlier?
Many people who are a liability at that age will give you every reason why their case is so. And I’m not going to debate the issue with them. What’s the point? The condition is hardly reversible once you’re in that region.
My focus is YOU, the twenty-something and thirty-something and, even, forty something. You can still do something to prevent this terrible disease from afflicting you.
But the unfortunate thing is that those who will be a victim of this condition have already started to show the trait at this early stage of their lives. They are the type that see what is wrong in everything someone else is doing but nothing wrong about themselves.
Again, you know them. They talk about how bad the government is from morning till night. They know the government official that is most corrupt; the rich man next door who is using his business as a camouflage but is actually a cocaine pusher; the high-flying female business executive who is only getting ahead because she knows how to sleep around.
And what is the source of their news? No, they don’t buy newspapers or have a functional television in their house. They are the ones you see at vendors’ tables around the cities very early in the morning poring over newspapers when serious people are going to work.
They call them association of free readers.
Unfortunately, the army of this group of people is increasing in our land. And while I frankly believe that our governments still have a lot to do to reduce their number, I do not subscribe to the cheap political score that some self-serving politicians try to earn by putting all the blame on elective office holders.
What you see at play there is the crab mentality of pull him down so I can take over his office in the next election by egocentric politicians. Let the truth be told; many of the people who have enlisted into this group can still change their situation. They can still turn their lives around by taking a decision.
Yes, a decision. And the decision is: I will not be a liability to the people around me in my old age. Once that decision is taken, once you realize that not taking that decision NOW will lead you to joining the increasing army of those who depend on others for their survival, your thinking will change and you’ll start seeing things differently.
For example, a long way back –– as way back as early eighties after I left the Nigerian Army –– I had made up my mind that I would create my own empire and be the emperor in it. The life of total independence that I’m living today takes root from back then.
As a result of it, I’m constantly focused on what I could do to ensure that there is food on my family’s table. In the process of making that happen, I discovered that the way to sustain that lifestyle is to think about how to be feeding more mouths than we have in my family.
I also realized that the only way that I would not jeopardize my efforts is to ensure that I’m engaged in what the laws of my country regard as legitimate and to live peaceably with my fellow men as the Word of GOD commands.
These are all the result of decisions taken at one point or the other in my life. I’ll tell you; none of these decisions was easy or convenient for me to take at the time I did. But the realization that if I did not take them, it would lead me to where I’ve decided I’ll never belong, I had to take them.
You just decide today that you don’t want to be a liability. The first thing you will notice is that most things you depend on others for, or most things that you think other people ought to provide for you, will float into your mind and you will be asked: are you saying you want to do without these things or how do you want to provide them for yourself?
Don’t allow that to scare you. Say to yourself at that crucial moment that you’ve accepted the responsibility of providing them for yourself and be firm in that decision. Like a miracle, what you will discover next is that creative ways of how to go about achieving that new objective are what will be occurring to you.
Stay with me as I have more to say on this first step next week.
