Many Americans try retirement, then change their mind
Sue Ellen King had circled her retirement date on the calendar: March 8, 2015.
She had worked as a critical care nurse and nursing educator at University of Florida Health in Jacksonville for 38 years; co-workers joked that she was there when the hospital’s foundation was laid, which happened to be true.
So the send-offs went on for days — parties in the units where she had worked, a dinner in her honor, gifts including a framed photo signed by colleagues.
King felt ready. She’d turned 66, her full Social Security retirement age. She had invested fully in the hospital’s 401(k) plan and consulted with a financial adviser.
She and her husband, who had already retired, had paid off the mortgage on their three-bedroom ranch. They took a week’s trip to Hilton Head, S.C., to celebrate their impending freedom.
But her retirement lasted just three months. “I’d done all the preparation, except to really think about what life was going to be like,” King said. Days spent organizing recipes and photos, and lunching with friends, proved less engaging than expected.
So when her hand-picked replacement needed a maternity leave, King jumped at the chance to return for three months. Now back at work in a part-time position she designed for herself, she calls herself “a failed retiree.”
Economists refer to this sort of U-turn as “unretirement.” (In “partial retirement,” another variant, an employee cuts back to part-time status but doesn’t actually leave the workplace.)
Unretirement is becoming more common, researchers report. A 2010 analysis by Nicole Maestas, an economist at Harvard Medical School, found that more than a quarter of retirees later resumed working. A more recent survey, from RAND Corp., the nonprofit research firm, published in 2017, found almost 40 percent of workers over 65 had previously, at some point, retired.
“We definitely see evidence that retirement is fluid,” said Kathleen Mullen, a RAND senior economist and co-author of its American Working Conditions Survey. “There’s less of the traditional schedule: work to a certain age, retire, see the world.