Police Retirement the Ultimate Long Seven

I was already retired before I really understood how this is supposed to work. I my experience it doesn’t necessarily do that; I mean work. Check out this informational link

http://youtu.be/9-zWZzpZscY

Did you know that many of the most successful men of our times never completed the entire “get a good education,” that leads to a good job process? Examples, neither Henry Ford nor the Wright Brothers ever even finished high school. More recently, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and others all started in college but they all dropped out because they realized that they no longer wanted to prepare for a job, what they wanted was to create their own business, based on their own vision and thereby create their own wealth.

This does not necessarily mean that formal education is less important today, than it was in the past; what it really means it that there are sources of information and examples of success out there for people who want to take charge of their financial future and how to get it done. These other sources and examples of successes of which I speak, are in and of themselves another form of education.  I am a firm believer that one can learn every day, in a variety of ways. What I am suggesting here is that if you think that you want to take steps to ensure your own financial future, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, follow the blueprints that are already out there, learn what others before you have already done and follow their example. Success does leave clues. Continue reading →

After spending thirty years as a law-enforcement officer; I find myself wearing my other hat, that of an Associate Professor of Criminology. I find myself wondering why as much as we have advanced as a society we have not advanced nearly as far as we need too. It should come as no great surprise that what I am referring to is the case of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida.

The case as we know, it centers on a law that simply states that a civilian has the right to stand and defended him or herself from an attacker by any means, including deadly force, if that citizen feels threatened. From my own personal experiences as a homicide supervisor I know that officers who have an obligation to seek out suspicious individuals and their activities, upon confronting said suspicious individual there is still a standard of behavior that must be adhered to during that contact. That standard is called “Escalation of Force.” Roughly this standard says that an officer, whose duty it is put himself in harm’s way, can only use that force necessary to affect an arrest. If an officer were too arbitrarily shoot an unarmed suspect, Black or White, there would undoubtedly be a huge outcry from the community and well there should be. In my estimation it should therefore come as no great shock that the outrage that is currently being expressed across the country is taking place. Continue reading →

Two days ago I was talking with some active duty police officers who were going at it, hot and heavy, about C.O.L.A. (s); Cost of Living Allowances, as they relate to securing a meaningful standard of living. Some of the officers believed that the COLA system works exactly as it is designed to do on paper. In truth, my experience is that it does not. The COLA program is supposed to ensure that retired police officers get regular adjustments to their pensions so that their standard of living can be maintained. I first want to give you the down and dirty, from my own personal experience. My department’s COLA program is designed to pay up to 3.0%, to maintain that standard of living. Now the key words here are up to 3.0%. At the time of this writing, first and foremost, our retirees have never gotten a 3.0%, Cost of Living Adjustment. More importantly, in the almost three years that I have been retired, in two of those years there was no adjustment, at all. I am not sure about anyone else, but has there been a time in the past few years where the cost of living has not gone up; and not just 3.0%? The pension board has the ability, the authority to say that retirees will or will not get their COLA(s); something you don’t hear about when planning on retirement. I know for a fact that I never heard about it. Something for officers who are still working, if your department does have retirement negotiation options, stay on top of those negotiations. Continue reading →

Did you know that less than half of all Americans have done nothing substantial in the way of planning for their retirement? Having spent (30) years as a police officer, I would like to believe these numbers are not reflective of police officers as a group; but in truth, they probably are! Even if the numbers are not really indicative of how we as police officers plan for retirement, my experience suggest to me that we could and should be planning better for our retirements. Better preparation for retirement can make all the difference in your world. Continue reading →