Forget cat food, with a pension fund its all lobster and steak

You spend a lifetime toiling, in the office and at home. The best years of your life filing reports, talking with clients and raising a family. Your barely have the time to wipe the sweat from your weary brow. After slaving away more than a third of your life, after your brittle bones can no longer drag themselves into the office, you find yourself pushed into the Golden Years of retirement.

The question is, are you ready? Have you prepared for your retirement? Do you have the savings to survive those last remaining years without that regular monthly paycheck?

Some people are confused about just what it means to be prepared for retirement. A recent survey indicated a number of Indonesians felt they would need some millions of dollars to be able to retire comfortably.

Of course, most people don't plan on retiring from their middle-management job to a mansion on the golf course and round- the-world trips aboard their yacht. Basically, most of us have a firmer grip on reality.

Even in modest retirement, one must have sufficient funds to allow for the generally longer life spans we now enjoy. Medical science has made such rapid advances, doctors can now keep alive nothing more than a pile of bones and a couple of vital organs. Basically, the only way you're exiting this world is if you're decapitated, and even then, if your head is rushed to the hospital, doctors have a 50-50 chance of successfully reattaching it, although you may feel some discomfort when the weather turns cold.

However, with longer lives, you need to be assured you won't end up having to live with and depend on your adult children in your old-age. That situation could be quite disconcerting; to every day have to endure the glares of your child, who is waiting for your deteriorating health to outrace medical advances so there is something left for them to inherit when you finally take the big sleep.

Not that all children are so avaricious. I, for one, rarely calculate how much money I stand to make if my parents were to, shall we say, take that final journey. Of course, when I have happened to think about the matter, hoping against all hope, naturally, that such a thing will never happen, I note that the longer my parents stay with us, the less money I stand to collect. Meaning, when they retire, they're going to go through their savings at a nice clip as they progress through their retirement years.

Because my parents are quite healthy, with few or no vices, they can expect quite long lives, thank God. They had certainly better have made financial preparations for their retirement because if they were to find themselves out of money and forced to turn to me for help, they would, to their sorrow, discover they had raised a semi-shiftless son who barely has the means to support himself. In other words, if they can't help themselves, no one else will.

How exactly does one prepare for retirement? A pension fund, of course. In Indonesia, the Department of Finance Pension Fund (DPLK) manages pension funds for corporate clients. The main goal of pension funds is to create employee wealth during employees' working lives, so that a comfortable retirement is no mere dream, but a guaranteed reality.

So if you work for a company which cares enough for its employees' well-being to have joined DPLK, count your blessings, watch your retirement fund grow and think of the day you can get out of the office and onto the golf course. And for all those employees whose companies do not have pension funds, bring it to the attention of management. Chances are they simply overlooked the need to take care of their employees once they reach retirement. Surely, no company would be so callous as to simply not care about an employee once they are no longer a productive member of the staff. So it must be a simple case of oversight, which I am sure they will be happy to correct once you bring it to their attention.

And for all you companies who have not joined DPLK, consider this: a happy worker is a productive worker. Or better yet, consider this: why should an employee care about the company when it is obvious the company does not care about the employees. Get a pension fund for your employees, show them you care and watch their happiness and productivity increase.

After all, you really can't expect employees to give full attention to their work when they are worrying about having to decide between chicken and tuna flavor once they retire. (David Eyerly)