Three Years of an Income Cliff After Retirement: “I Kept Knocking Until a University Lecture Hall Opened”

Seven faded reporting notebooks and eight books sit on Kang Seong-gon’s table, holding 37 years of his professional life. The 64-year-old spent that career as a KBS announcer focused on broadcast language research. Today, he teaches speech as an adjunct professor in Gachon University’s Department of Media and Communication, writes newspaper columns and gives public talks about opera.

His current life may look stable and polished, but it followed three years of what he describes as an income “famine” after retirement. Kang left KBS in 2022 at age 60. He had not drawn a detailed picture of life after work, carrying only a general sense of concern into retirement.

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The biggest mistake I made before retirement was receiving and spending my retirement allowance in advance.

His biggest mistake, he said, came before he left. “The biggest mistake I made before retirement was receiving and spending my retirement allowance in advance,” Kang said. He applied two or three times whenever the company posted an opportunity for interim payment, without giving it much thought, because he needed money to increase a housing lease deposit.

“After working for 37 years and leaving the company, I had only 50 million won in retirement pay in my hands,” he said. The gap between his distinguished career and the uncertainty that followed became the central hardship of his retirement transition. He eventually kept pursuing opportunities until he found university teaching, then added writing and public speaking to his second career.

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After working for 37 years and leaving the company, I had only 50 million won in retirement pay in my hands.