Month: May 2021

Smart lifestyle tips for retirees

One of the ways to enjoy a comfortable retirement is by engaging in a chain of healthy behaviors that eventually form a lifestyle that enables you to thrive every single day.

As your partner invested in your tomorrow, it is our duty to keep providing you with tips that help you make the most of your retirement.

These 4 tips will help improve your lifestyle.

1. Keep active

Find ways to stay active and keep fit each day. Consider activities that you enjoy which maintains strength, balance and flexibility while promoting cardiovascular health. Physical activity helps you stay at a healthy weight, prevent or control illness, sleep better, move better, reduce stress, avoid falls and feel and look better.

2. Eat well

When you eat nutritious foods in the right amounts, you not only stay heathier, but you also ward off many illnesses like heart diseases, obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and more.

3. Prevent falls

We become vulnerable to falls as we get older. Prevent falls and injury by keeping paths clear of electrical cords and clutter, removing slippery rugs or carpets, cleaning up spilled liquids and using nigh lights in the hallways and bathrooms. When moving about, choose footwears with good support and strong under-foot grip to avoid slipping.

4. Go for regular check-ups

By age 50, women should begin mammography screening for breast cancer while from age 40, men should check for prostate cancer. Make sure you don’t skip health checkups and use these visits to discuss any other health concerns you may have with your doctor.

 For more tips to enjoy your retirement, visit www.armpension.com/blog

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Stages of retirement planning

Now that we’ve looked at what retirement planning is and the benefits of retirement planning, it is pertinent that we explore some guidelines for successfully planning your retirement at different stages of your life.

 

Young Adulthood (21-35 years old)

 

If you fall into this age bracket, you have sufficient time to let your investments mature which is an important and valuable factor in retirement planning. The reason for this is that you enjoy the benefits of compound interest which allow your retirement savings to earn interest and that interest to earn even more interest. This means that the more time your retirement savings stays before you retire, the more interest you will earn.

 

If for instance, you make additional voluntary contributions of N20,000 monthly in your retirement savings to match what your employer contributes, it will be worth three times more if you invest it at age 25 than if you wait to start investing at age 45 – that’s the beauty of compounding.

 

Early midlife (36-50 years old)

 

At this time in your life, even though you may have some number of financial responsibilities to bear, chances are you may have climbed a bit higher up the career ladder with some extra income as well, hence it is critical that you continue saving at this stage of retirement planning. The combination of earning more and the time you still have to invest and enjoy compound interest makes these years some of the best for aggressive savings.

 

Consider bumping up your additional voluntary contributions now as well to ensure that you have enough to fund the lifestyle you desire when you retire.

 

Later midlife (50-65 years old)

 

While time is running out to save for most people at this stage of retirement planning, the possibility of receiving higher wages due to career climb and having paid off some weighing debts can provide more disposable income to invest.

 

This is also the time to be frugal with expenses if you haven’t saved a lot for retirement or create periodic budgets to manage all that you’ve accumulated to ensure that you don’t outlive your money.

 

Whatever stage you are now in the retirement planning life cycle, you can speak to us about your retirement concerns via [email protected] or 0700 CALL ARM.

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This thing called retirement!

Retirement is that time of life when a person chooses to permanently leave the workforce behind. In Nigeria, the average retirement age for those in the public sector varies between 55-60 years while some retirees who are fit and healthy often opt for a private employ when they retiree to either keep busy or meet up with expenses.

 

Retirement can last for decades these days due to increased life expectancy and typically consists of multiple phases.

 

Phases of retirement

 

According to Late sociologist Robert Atchley who was around in the 1970s, retirement can come in six phases.

 

1. Pre-retirement: This is the planning phase where a person starts to think seriously about the life they want for themselves in retirement and whether they’re financially on track to achieve it.

 

2. Retirement: This phase is the transition from full-time work to retirement.

 

3. Contentment: This is a happy phase where the retiree enjoys the fruits of their lifetime hard work. People call it the honeymoon period and if the retiree saved enough money, this phase could last a lot longer.

 

4. Disenchantment: Once the honeymoon phase is over, some retirees may experience some of the emotional downsides of retirement like loneliness, disillusionment, and a feeling of uselessness.

 

5. Reorientation: When in this phase, people try to understand who they are at that moment and figure out their place in the world as a retiree.

 

6. Routine: During this phase, retirement now becomes more familiar, and one tends to accept their situation and settle into a new set of routines. For some, this means discovering a new sense of purpose and taking advantage of the opportunity to enjoy life; for others who didn’t save enough and need to supplement their income, it can mean getting a part-time job.

 

Retirement in olden-day Nigeria

 

Not many people in Nigeria had grand or great grandparents who planned for retirement. It is typical to see children being the retirement plan for a certain number of aged parents who once they get to a certain age, depend solely on their children for their financial needs.

 

It can be argued that back then most of our parents didn’t do blue-collar jobs that allowed them to have a pension plan and that entrepreneurship was not as lucrative due to the absence of the technology that is available today to enable traders to save ahead. However, that argument may still be shaky considering that only a small percentage of Nigerians consider the benefits of saving for retirement.

Retirement in present-day Nigeria

 

Today, while some Nigerians are still stuck in the age-old mentality of expecting their children to be their retirement plan, more Nigerians are taking retirement more seriously.

 

Nigerians who are employed in public and private sectors have the mandatory contributory pension scheme which is a combination of deductions made from their salary matched with their employer’s contribution into their retirement savings account to ensure they have something tangible to fall back to in retirement. Aside from this, more Nigerians are opting for additional contributions to their retirement savings as they look forward to a retirement where they don’t have to be financially dependent on anybody.

 

In the most recent past, entrepreneurs have also been given the opportunity to start saving for retirement through the Micro Pension scheme which was not previously available.

 

In conclusion…

 

Nobody likes to be a nuisance to another especially at a time in your life when you should relax and enjoy the rewards of your years of hard work. Hence, the most important part when you think of retirement should be planning – both for the financial and emotional impacts of retiring to ensure that you get a comfortable retirement.

 

Experts advise that as you plan for retirement, you should think about what it looks like. Talk to your friends. Write about it. Create a storyboard and be imaginative. Your financial plans and your day-to-day retirement plan should go hand in hand.

 

Walk into Tomorrow to plan your retirement today.

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What is Retirement Planning?

Retirement planning is simply the preparation for life after employment ends. This preparation impacts all aspects of your life and not just your finances.

The aspect that doesn’t require money include lifestyle choices like how to spend time in retirement, where to live, when to completely stop working and more. A well-rounded retirement plan should consider all these areas.

However, the approach or emphasis a person puts on retirement planning changes throughout different life stages.

Early career

During this time, the emphasis should be to set aside enough money for retirement. You have the luxury of time to accumulate what you need for retirement and the benefit of compounding interest to ensure that what you set aside accumulates returns over the long-term.

Mid-career

This time, while you’re still setting money aside in your retirement savings account, you should consider ways of increasing your retirement income by setting specific income or asset targets and taking prudent steps to achieve them. Let’s assume that over the course of your career, you ‘ve had pay raises or promotions, this means you have the opportunity to increase what you put into your pension pot.

Retirement

This is the time you hang your work boots and officially go from accumulating assets to what financial planners call the distribution phase. You’re no longer paying in, instead, your years of savings start to pay out. The good news for those who have managed to accumulate enough retirement income is that they can enjoy a comfortable retirement spent pursuing their hobbies and having fun. The reverse would be the case for those whose retirement income may not be enough.

Final thoughts…

Retirement planning should start long before you retire – in fact, the sooner, the better. You must figure out how much you need to retire comfortably and then work with that magic number in mind as you save ahead for retirement.

Our Retirement Lifestyle Planner enables you to Walk Into Tomorrow, today to plan out your dream retirement. On the easy-to-use portal, you get a holistic view of how your retirement lifestyle would be and how much you’d need at every point in your retirement. This helps you total up the magic number you need to save to get the retirement your desire.

Click here to Walk Into Tomorrow and plan your dream retirement now.

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