A story has been told of a senior civil servant who was so tormented by the fear of retirement that he falsified his age records. He succeeded in staying longer for only three months because the auditors discovered the fraud.
He had to refund the salary he collected for those extra months! This type of negative action resulting from the fear of retirement has been rightly attributed to the absence of a pre-retirement plan. If this officer had planned for retirement, he would have had so much confidence in his future that the falsification of his age records would never cross his mind.
The focus of this paper is on the resolution of the following questions:
Can the civil servant effectively plan for retirement while still actively doing his present work?
What are the reasons given by most public servants for refusing to plan for retirement?
What options are available outside pure business activities?
Why do some people live blissfully at retirement while others live in utter self-condemnation and penury?
A look at the agonizing faces of many retirees who did not plan for retirement shows the depth of sorrow and suffering they have found themselves in. Their new environment at retirement seems to be a war front with social and economic armaments scattered everywhere. It is at this point that many engage in emergency planning just to meet up with the problem.
It is for the prevention of this pitiable present-day scenario that all efforts directed towards the stimulation of the desires of serving public servants to engage in pre-retirement planning should be encouraged. This work asserts that pre-retirement planning is a distinctive and distinguishable activity which should be consciously and dynamically integrated into the job of potential retirees.
Correcting an Erroneous Misconception
Pre-retirement planning does not mean opening up a business while still serving as a civil servant. It does not also imply paying less attention to the present job; rather, it requires extra commitment and dedication to the present job as an essential preparation and development of new skills and attitudes which shall be carried over to retirement.
Experience has proven that those civil servants who served the state with total commitment were always engaged with useful activities at retirement, utilizing the learned virtues inherent in such earlier commitment as veritable intangible assets, while those who were unserious and uncommitted in their ‘hare’ days carried over their negative traits, in most cases roaming the streets as stragglers or run-away soldiers even in their retirement.