Many people have a picture in their mind about retirement and a lot of it involves travelling around the world and being able to play golf every second day. It is a time when you get to spend quality time with your fellow retirees and you can all sit and enjoy a cold beer on a warm summer evening. Everyone is smiling and life is good. The reality is much different than this, and especially for people who have chosen to be a first responder for the vast majority of their working lives. They deal with harrowing situations day in and day out and they rely on their work colleagues to get them through it all. Suddenly, they have reached retirement age and they are expected to leave their place of work, even though they’re not ready.
For many, first responder retirement is not something that they look forward to, and many find it quite difficult to deal with. They feel that they have many more years to offer, and while they may not feel strong physically, their mental agility is as good as it has always been. Nonetheless, there is a government mandated retirement age, and they need to take it whether they want to or not. If you think retirement has only upsides, then maybe the following downsides will give you a more realistic idea of what retirement is really like.
- Reduced income – Your whole working life, you have known exactly how much money you would be getting at the end of the working month. You have probably put in a lot of overtime, and so this adds to a very respectable salary. It has allowed you to live the life that you have, and now retirement has come, the purse strings need to be tightened. You now have to rely on your retirement benefits and in many cases it is much lower than you have been earning over the past 45 years. You now have to start cutting corners and watching the pennies and for many, this is not the retirement that they had in mind.
- Too much time on your hands – When working as a first responder, your days were filled with excitement and adrenaline filled activities. There weren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done that you had to do. Now that you’re retired, you’ve far too much time and nothing really to do. Boredom sets in and then so does depression, and before you know it your mental and physical health is suffering as a direct result. Trying to fill your days becomes increasingly more difficult and the days just seem to last so long.
Retirement is not something that first responders look forward to, and after reading this article, you should be able to appreciate the reasons why.
