I’m 58. Retired 2 years ago.
Rresponding in no particular order
You ignore the part of the cite’s quote that claimed “regardless of health.” That said looking up actual original studies, reviews, and meta analyses, it seems … mixed. Varying by SES and likely hosts of other factors. Not one size fits all. Still my looking into it more was sparked by an article about those “superagers” and features they share. Continuing to work is one thing they tend to have in common. It is too easy to become intellectually lazy and socially disconnected without the discipline of work, IMHO.
So the two main themes are those fearful of stopping work, not financially but otherwise, and what sort of support am I taking about?
I completely get people wanting to retire because their jobs are a drudge, or just stress. Frankly though when that is the case while working then it is important then to have other interests that give you satisfaction! I doubt it is healthy to continue to work if you are hating the work you do. But boy I could list dozens of new things I could take up and learn that I could enjoy. I know no musical instruments. I sculpted as a young adult. I could learn a racquet sport. Pick a new fitness goal like Hyrox. Read more. Take classes. There would be some self discipline in making myself do it but the options are many.
What sort of support?
I guess right off it is just annoying that the default, the assumption, is that we should be retiring. The two questions we get asked - “retiring?” and “grandkids?” No and not up to me. We old farts working are about as common as the old farts retiring and about half of us are doing it because it is what we want to do. I think it is important for us to know how not at all unusual we are.
And yeah @Dinsdale any search about RMDs will tell you that you need to start taking them at 73 and some will state the bit if born in 1959 or earlier but at 75 if in 1960 or later - but very very few mention the fact that you can let it ride if in a company sponsored plan and still working. What else do I not know?
Also, I haven’t experienced any ageism. A pediatrician in my company well into her 70s is harder working than most new docs and widely admired But I wonder how much others experience it in other sorts of jobs.
This is what I am pushing back against. Many of us do not feel constrained by our jobs. I’m no Bruce Springsteen but when we went to one of his concerts he addressed rumors that this was his farewell tour and that he was retiring - paraphrasing - I get tens of thousands people cheering me and shouting my name, why would I ever stop doing this? My work validations are not that size but I get appreciated many times a day, get amused seeing parents who I saw once as snotty babies … it’s not “Bruuuuce!” but it ain’t chopped liver.
This is a different thing. I have never wanted to be the smartest in the room. It’s part of the attraction of hanging out here! I’m not the dumbest but there are lots of folk smarter than me to learn from. Being the smartest in the room is boring for me. I’d rather have to work to keep up at least some of the time.
This. Before I retired I made up a spreadsheet of all the things that I hadn’t had a chance to do because I was working. It was sizeable. Many people who are retired find that they are busier than they were while working.
I loved working. But I hated the commute. And I love writing and volunteering and reading the Times in the morning even more.
Thank you.
I will decide when I am ready to retire.
Until then I just have to keep fending off the annoying inquiries.
In our area there’s a guy who was a firefighter who started a small construction business in the 1980s, then retired from the FD and kept doing construction. He’s really well known. His wife died 10 years ago or so and he’s in his 70s now. He says he wants to keep doing construction because he has nothing else to do. He remodeled my kitchen and has 2 guys working with him, probably in their 60s. I don’t think those guys came up through construction, they just wanted to learn.
They do a bang-up job and I’m so grateful that he’s still around to service our community, and has the forethought to bring some “younger” dudes along with him.
He has his state pension and his & his wife’s social security, and definitely doesn’t under-charge for his work. He can choose the jobs he wants and sets his own schedule. I’m friends with his daughter and I know he has a very rich family life with his kids and grandkids. I love this for him!
I would probably have continued to work a few more years if my job hadn’t been so stressful. I really hated to stop on a sour note, but the pressure was making me ill and I hated our Corps of Engineers overseers. At 62, finding another job was pretty unlikely, so I pulled the plug. I haven’t regretted doing that, as my mental and physical health were more important, but the circumstances were less than ideal. And I generally liked my profession, so a few more years would have been okay.
I think you’re going to get assumptions either way - it just depends on the people you know. I mostly got "Why haven’t you retired already? " until I retired - at 58. But that’s because I worked for a state government and was eligible for my pension and retiree health insurance at 55. Most people who worked longer either had no life outside work or in couple of cases , would rather never retire than give their ex-wives part of their pension. There were people who had private practices as social workers or attorneys who continued doing that even after retiring from the state job but that’s very different from a job that really does constrain your life.
My husband, on the other hand, worked as a salesman, and his customers were mostly immigrants who owned hardware stores. They assumed he was just quitting his job and getting another one, because why would you retire before 70?
I understand your concern.
My wife just retired and was worried about staying motivated to do things. I understand. Now she’s in a woman’s group that donates to charity, thinking about volunteering at a horse rescue. She is now outside raking leaves. We will start a garden next year.
We are both learning the piano. We play chess every night.
Now, I do have a partner, so a little different. But @Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker , there are many things to look at. Volunteer. Your life experience matters. Never, ever discount that.
Take up a or many hobbies. Sketching, drawing, painting, music. Only you will know that you suck. But what if you don’t suck? So what if you do? I’ve draw a lot of garbage, and then once in a while something makes you go hmmm… that’s pretty cool.
Writing. Costs nothing.
Gardening. Returns value.
What I’m trying to say is that retirement is not a black hole. It’s an open horizon.
I didn’t intend to suggest you had missed anything. And, yeah, there are a lot of moving parts WRT retirement, which are quite different from your past 4 decades of earning and saving to get to this point.
I think this would likely be a good opportunity to consult an adviser - whether an accountant or investor - on an hourly basis, to help map out a game plan. I have to admit that there are likely some points - whether RMDs, Roth conversions, Medicare… - that I couldn’t tell you precisely why we decided what we decided. But we DID reach decisions at one point in the past year or two, involving considerable research and questioning several purported “experts” - both paid and unpaid. We may not have reached what anyone else considers the BEST options, but they work for us. I’m confident that we’ll be reasonably comfortable throughout a long retirement, and will likely still leave something to our kids.
If I were to name one thing I DON’T want to do in the 2d half of my 60s and on into my 70s, 80s, and possibly 90s, it is fuck around with investments, trying to figure out how to tweak things to my utmost advantage. Might be dollar foolish of me, but IMO, I worked hard and lived frugally to get myself to the point that I will NOT have to attend to matters so carefully.
Now my dad was different. In his last decade or so, he derived considerable enjoyment from managing his investments.
Tomorrow is my 65th birthday. I intend to retire approximately 2 years from now, in the end of 27. If I work for pay at all after that, it will be on a part-time basis at a local golf course, hopefully to get me free greens fees and driving range privileges! What was Kevin Spacey’s line in American Beauty? “I want the job with the LEAST possible responsibility!” 
Oh not thinking you did. More that I thought you were saying the RMD information is readily available - but less so for these circumstances.
My accountant conversations have been brief. Basically Roth conversions don’t make sense for us because we won’t have the decreased income years with us both working ongoing.
I really do need to meet with the estate planning lawyer. No excuses.
Yes. Mine called me yesterday to remind me about an RMD from an account inherited from my mom. Finance has never been my thing. So thank you Sharon.
That’s cool. My BIL’s FIL was injured in WWII. Metal plate in his head. Could not work. He turned into an investment genius. Nothing else to do but study the markets.
Happy Birthday!
I now have a neighbor that does that. Retired. I think he parks golf carts or something at a very nice club. He plays for free. It’s a favorite place for my wife and I to eat. You don’t need to be a member, but damn, they have good food and it’s close.
I love that line, love the movie. Another favorite line. “It’s a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself"
We moved. Oddly, in the basement there is a big as mirror in the wet bar downstairs. It’s a strange place for it. So I bought a bunch of dry erase markers to put up sayings and random thoughts on it. It should have a purpose. Now it does.
Smile. I think @chappachula was making a joke about working with a room full of puppies.
I understood the joke to be making a point, of contrast to the friend?
Apologies if I saw a whoosh where there wasn’t one. I’m not sure how sincere chappachula’s remark about not wanting to work with smarter young people was, but your response was appropriate.
As for working past 67, I lost my my job at 66, but was planning on working till 70. I’ve always had pleasant jobs in my chosen field (art/photography/graphic design), and I’m an introvert who enjoys the superficial personal interactions of the workplace. And because my jobs (and self-employment) were not chosen for maximum salary, the extra years of income would have been welcome.
If anyone enjoys their job and wants to continue it past their mid-60s that’s a good thing.
Gee, I didn’t expect my post about puppies to draw so much attention. Ya’ll wanna hear about the room full of kittens, too? 
My point (about my 70 yr old lawyer friend with his smart young coworkers) was that he still enjoys the mental stimulation of working.And that’s great–for him. But me (construction engineer), my brain is happier when it is less stimulated.I was sick of the constant high pressure, heavy responsibility, tight deadlines, etc. I had a satisfying career, and now it’s time to move on.
Fair choice for you to make! Just be aware that your friend, and those who keep themselves challenged cognitively and physically while retired, have much better odds of aging without significant disability (both cognitive and physical) than those who say “ah now I can relax!”
But puppies are good for mental health too!
I guess I’ll join you in the not-retired club. I retired a year ago February. I played a fair amount of Minecraft, but i also volunteered for a ton of stuff, and was extremely busy. My husband said, “you are working too hard, you need to go back to work”. And a lot of the time was overhead. Getting to a place, negotiating when to meet, that sort of thing.
A recruiter called out of the blue, and hired me for a part time temporary gig.
And i loved it. I had already booked a lot of travel, and i made that clear up front, and i just didn’t work when i had stuff planned. It was part time even when i was in town, so i never felt over worked. It was hourly, so i never felt cheated out of my time. (A problem with my last position before i retired, and one of the reasons i did so. In theory i was part time, but i was salaried…) And, yeah, i got a lot of affirmation from it. I did good quality work, and my coworkers respected me for that. Even when my price was higher than the underwriters wanted, they generally trusted me and understood my explanation of how I’d come to that number. It was really satisfying.
So when that job ended, i expressed some regret in my square dance group. And one of the other dancers said, “you should consider working for my company”. And i gave him a resume and…
I’m starting work tomorrow. On paper, this is my dream job. It’s fully remote except for some travel to meet with clients. It’s part time, and they promise me the hours are very flexible. It’s hourly. The work is episodic, I’ll finish a thing and move on to the next thing. So i ought to get satisfaction from each thing i finish. I know a few of my future coworkers, and they all seem like people I’d like to work with.
I mean, you never know until you know. Maybe I’ll hate it and retire again in two months. But right now I’m pretty excited to be returning to work.
Wow, congratulations!
That’s really an ideal situation. Congrats!
If there was a practical way for me to do some variant of my job on a very part time basis where I control the broad blocks of the schedule that’d probably be for the best. At least until creeping infirmity takes me out of the game.
Back when I was leaving IT and returning to airlining (call it early 2010s) I had looked around for part time developer gigs. What I found was that temp agencies and recruiters and what-not abound. As do job openings, both local and remote. It was also one of the first fields to be heavily remote-as-normal even back then. Software dev has become very much a career of temp gigs. Which sounds ideal as a second job / post retirement job, etc.
But every manager of every business wanted every project done ASAP. So the minimum time commitment they’d accept was 40 (read as “50-plus”) hours a week. Nobody had part-time go-slow work. Nobody.
I suspect that aspect of that industry hasn’t changed since. My own dev skills are as outdated as an 18th century blacksmith’s. So no IT for me.
My problem - if it is a problem - is that I built my career in something I am quite good at, but don’t enjoy and that doesn’t interest me. So there are no possibilities of part-time or more interesting work in that area.
My greatest career interests often lie in areas that require physical capabilities I no longer retain. Or areas that would require lengthy training, or would not allow a flexible schedule.
But I’m content that my main interests of golf and playing music will keep my body and mind sharp well into my dotage. Like I said, at most, a part time job at a local golf course.
Sorry if this is a hijack.
Of those who intend to keep working, without details - what is your financial situation? COuld you retire comfortably on your savings? I suspect there are differences between the group who keeps working because they enjoy their job or don’t know what to replace it with, and those who have inadequate savings and feel Social Security and what they have will not support them adequately.