BY PAUL HOYLE
Eventually, if we are fortunate, each of us will reach the point in our career when we can start to consider the option of retirement. For those of us who have prepared well and have given retirement the proper amount of planning, this can be a great opportunity to seek out new goals and challenges.
Whether you are a paid firefighter completing a career in local government or a volunteer approaching the end of a career in business or industry, being aware of the pitfalls that an unwary firefighter might encounter can help to make the decision to retire a blessing rather than an administrative and fiscal nightmare.
Most of us are not enamored with administrative processes. On the other hand, we are pretty comfortable making critical decisions on the fireground. We can use this expertise to approach the retirement problem from a familiar perspective.
SIZE-UP
As on the fireground, we need to conduct a thorough size-up: What makes retirement a successful option? First, you must meet the conditions of retirement for the organization that hired you. Although this seems simple on the surface, a sit-down meeting with your human resources representative can save many hours of stress, confusion, and lost retirement income. Sometimes, something as simple as choosing between two dates, 24 hours apart, can mean a difference of tens of thousands of dollars over your retirement. At the command post, we don’t hesitate to call in subject matter experts for advice during an incident. Your human resource representatives are the experts here. Pick their brains!
Second, but even more important, is money. If your potential retirement income does not meet the needs of your financial situation, you should defer the decision to retire until you have a plan for making up the difference. By the time retirement is an option, most of us fall somewhere in the financial middle: We will earn enough money to meet absolute needs but not enough to sustain our desired lifestyles. If this is the case for you, then you must modify your lifestyle, work in some paid capacity to make up the difference, or do some combination of the two. Or, of course, you can continue to work, postponing the retirement option until the benefits from your retirement plan increase to a more practical level.
INCIDENT ACTION PLAN
So, your size-up is complete, and it indicates that retirement is a practical option. Now you need to develop an incident action plan, identifying the objectives, strategies, and tactics that will provide a desired outcome for your retirement decision using the resources you have available. You know that failure to appropriately establish an incident action plan on a complex incident will reduce your control of the incident and can increase risk to your crews. Insufficient retirement planning can equally result in unexpected consequences that can affect you and your family (your crew) far into the future.
Since we are looking at this from the perspective of an incident or event action plan, it behooves us to consider adding to our “command staff.” Spouses, children, and families all have a vested interest in the outcome of your retirement planning. They also bring to the table perspective and expertise you may not have. It is your retirement, but the event affects all of you. It’s also a good idea to bring technical experts aboard for advice just as you would on the fireground. Investment advisers, insurance brokers, human resource specialists, and counselors, to name just a few, can all provide critical information that you don’t have.
OBJECTIVES
Our objectives are developed based on the time-proven priorities of life safety, incident stabilization, and property conservation. Although we usually consider these within the context of an emergent situation, they also have a less acute but no less important application to our retirement problem.
Probably the largest life safety consideration that you should address is the ability to provide for current and anticipated health care requirements, as well as making allowance for unforeseen medical problems. Does your retirement plan have health insurance benefits? Are they sufficient? Do they cover your family as well as you? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” what options do you have for covering the gaps?
Incident stabilization considerations will be less acute than those we are used to, but the lasting impact can be just as great on a personal level. The question of enough income to accomplish your retirement goals is probably the largest variable. Money can overcome many, but not all, obstacles. If retirement income won’t be enough, can you supplement it with work in a familiar field, or is it time to start a new career?
Of course, money isn’t everything. Retiring to your couch with your remote control and snacks readily at hand is okay and well deserved for a short period, but it won’t result in a very stable (or healthy) lifestyle. Spending more time with your family is a frequent and an important goal, but how will you spend this time? How much is too much? Remember, for those of us who are married, our spouses have adjusted to our career schedule. They have taken care of “things” at home and are used to independently making decisions regarding day-to-day activities and controlling their own schedule. Adjusting to your presence on a more or less continuous basis is going to create challenges and require a good deal of negotiation from each of you.
For many of us, it is likely that some of our newfound time will be used to cover the income gap. We hope, though, that retirement will free up time for some of the hobbies or interests that are sitting on the sidelines because of the demands of our career. Which of these do you want to pursue, and to what level? Most of us are service oriented. Do you want to continue providing a service to your community? If so, and I hope it is so, in what capacity do you want to serve? Do you assist with something in a field familiar to you such as a volunteer fire department or community emergency response team, or do you want to shift to something completely new? Whichever way you decide, making productive use of the time you gain through retirement is important to your mental health and to your self-image.
Another area to look at is your support structure. Whether you remain in the area or move across the country, your peer structure will change. That doesn’t mean that you can’t continue old friendships, but becoming the old firefighter who hangs out each morning at the local firehouse is probably not an effective coping mechanism. Seek out new friends with common interests. Some of you will find it helpful to find an objective counselor to assist you or your family with the many changes that retirement brings. We aren’t afraid to provide for critical incident counseling for our personnel following large and life-changing incidents. Retirement can certainly meet this criterion.
Finally, property conservation issues will probably also be tied to money. It bears considering that things wear out. Homes and vehicles require maintenance, and both are subject to replacement costs. Knowing what your maintenance costs are goes a long way toward planning for their coverage following retirement.
STRATEGY AND TACTICS
Now you have your objectives locked down. Turning these objectives into strategies is a straightforward exercise that you have done many times. Your strategies should guide you down the path of accomplishing your objectives. If you need income from part-time work, for instance, you need to identify the potential employers. What are the educational requirements for the position you desire? Can you afford to complete these after retirement, or should you start classes now? Is your resume (and yes, you will need one!) current?
Each concern identified while creating your objectives should be addressed with a focused strategy whose progress and success can be tracked through pertinent metrics. Then you need to actually track that progress.
If you have been around long enough to consider retirement, you probably haven’t been actively involved in the accomplishing tactics for a long while. Since you are new to the “retirement” incident, you will have to brush off some rust and get down in the grass again. The resume won’t write itself. Your insurance agent has expertise but requires your input to provide you with the product you need. Job applications (mostly accomplished online now!) have to be completed. All of the “hands-on” work that you might have been comfortable delegating in the recent past now lands squarely on your shoulders. Fortunately, just as you had plenty of help developing knowledge and skills early in your career, there is an incredible amount of assistance available to help you plan effectively for retirement. Local libraries, books, Internet resources, seminars, and conferences abound. Take advantage of as many as you need.
You have a plan now. Objectives, strategies, and tactics have been identified and developed. Everything is measurable and attainable. Just as you have learned to commit your incident action plans to paper for complex and long-duration events, you should do the same for your retirement plan. And you need to keep your plan in front of you as you go about carrying it out. Create a status board or checklist to help you track events, just as you do on the fireground. Finally, revise the plan when conditions change or when you are not getting the outcome you desire.
Deciding to retire is one of the most significant changes we will make in our lives. It is impossible to have answers for all of the questions that will arise, and there are definite consequences for failing to consider all options. Fortunately, we in the fire service have built our careers on our ability to make quality decisions with incomplete information. We have learned to rely on others for expertise that we don’t have. We have learned to be aggressive in action and conservative in risk management. All of these lessons can help us to effectively prepare for retirement. Let’s use what we have learned to make our retirement the best that it can be. We’ve earned it!
PAUL HOYLE retired from the Portsmouth (VA) Department of Fire, Rescue, and Emergency Services, where he served in multiple suppression and specialty team assignments and managed the emergency medical service and fire marshal divisions. Hoyle is an adjunct instructor with the Virginia Department of Fire Programs, a member of the Hampton Roads Regional All-Hazards Incident Management Team, and a member of the Virginia Disaster Medical Assistance Team. He serves with the Carrollton (VA) Volunteer Fire Department.
