WHEN SHOULD I RETIRE?

Because, now more than ever, the choice is yours....

Hello there, dear readers

I hope this edition finds you well. Are you seeing signs of Spring, like I am. In some places, the snowdrops are well and truly out and nodding their delicate heads in the wind with daffodils poking through. Where I am in the North West, they aren’t fully blooming as yet, but I was down in the South East the early part of this week, and they were fully in bloom. So, whatever stage your daffies are at, I hope you are enjoying them.

So, in this issue I want to look at the idea of retiring. And although a lot of you reading this will be nowhere near retirement age, why I’m including it is because we’re at a stage when a lot of it is left up to us.

In decades past the decision to retire often came down to a fixed “retirement age” set by employers or governments. But today things are different. Many of us are living longer, healthier lives, work is evolving, and the idea that once you hit “X years old” you stop working. But is this no longer the default.

When I first started working in the 1980’s, I worked in a government department that dealt with state retirement pension payments and frequently I was helping those in receipt of the retirement pension with any queries that they had.

But, and I’d forgotten this until recently, back then is was MANDATORY that once a woman reached her 60th birthday she was obliged to retire and stop working. I’m not sure whether there was any legislation was in place to make this happen, but I do remember that it was the norm amongst employers. Any woman approaching her 60th birthday was automatically put out to pasture and nobody questioned it. As a raw 18 year old I never did.

But looking back, that is actually APALLING! How dare anyone decide you automatically retire regardless of how effective you still are at your job or your health status.

Thankfully, in the intervening years things have changed considerably.

That shift puts the decision in our hands: Do we retire because we’ve done enough, we’re ready, finances allow it—and we want to? Or do we carry on working because we still derive meaning, variety, income, structure from our work?

Because of that, the question is less “have I reached age 60 (or whatever)” and more “am I ready (financially, physically, mentally) and am I doing it because I want to, not because I feel forced?”

So, when should we retire? And indeed, are we retiring too early?

Here’s what the science tells us. Also what this means for you - key signals and questions