On Not Retiring

We are entering an age where retirement is becoming less likely.

We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s on a generous income, with time and good health enough to fulfil long-held dreams. For them, it may already be too late to make the changes necessary to retire at all.

Indeed. However, when I was in my thirties, I watched a generation of colleagues leave work and then die of boredom a few years later. I also observed their sudden drop in income – despite most of them having good pensions. I realised then that I wouldn’t retire. Quite apart from the Ponzi nature of NI contributions, I want to maintain my living standards for as long as I can. I enjoy my work and fail to see why I should stop just because I reach an arbitrary age. I might slow down a little – ease off on those long distance trips across the country for railway assessments and concentrate more on the motorcycle training, but give up? No, not on the cards.

So, apart from the body getting weaker, old age does not fill me with dread. I’ll be working until I drop because I choose to.

8 Comments

  1. In NZ 65 is merely the age where the pension starts, you can retire when you like, your employer can’t make you.

  2. I can understand not wanting to retire if you really enjoy your job. My job isn’t hard or stressful, I rarely have to do more than 39 hours a week, but I don’t like it so much that I would want to keep doing it if I didn’t need to. My approach to the inevitable drop in income is just not being very materialistic. I don’t have any debts so everything that I have is paid for so I shall be retiring as soon as I know that I will be able to get by. As for dying of boredom, what sort of a Billy No Life do you have to be to do that?

  3. You will find that your body cares little for your intentions.
    Assuming your spouse remains in health.
    And you have that ‘liquid health’ ie money to buy good doctors.
    By age eighty it becomes hard going,.
    Even famous well to-do give up about then

  4. Having grow old(ish) I have been drawing my pension for almost five years. Lucky me, for I still get about under my own steam. I try to use the time to do what I want so again, lucky me: no more listening to young not-know-anythings giving me orders.

    But I am crucially ware that the ‘golden age’ of any pensions is rapidly fading. As we must divert more and more cash to those multiplying ‘refugees’ there is less and less available for those who worked their life in expectation of a return. Ha! You were outflanked by those who want to care (at a distance) and share (what you earned.)

    You pay in and er, ir gets taken away for the benefit of the supposedly needy.

    My wife, alas, is younger than me by some margin and the government’s decision to raise her pensionable age overnight from 60 to 67 (a weird number) meant that she has to continue toiling longer. She has, btw, a stressful job dealing not only with the mentally-challenged (aka bureaucracy) but these with learning difficulties, some of which have and will involve the youngster heading for criminal proceedings.

    She also has become reliant on the NHS but joining various queues (I call it the QHS) for any attention, even making an appointment to make an appointment — though the QHS is much beloved by our blue-socialist masters — the prospect of her sitting with her feet up is literally a long way off.

    My kids will find they will have to go on working though happily when I was younger there was a greater requirement for physical work. Shuffling papers and reading memos is less demanding than lifting bags of cement, I believe.

  5. You don’t want to retire because you have not yet experienced the joys of retirement and cannot compare what they are like to the joy of the job. It takes an investment in time to figure out how to tremendously enjoy yourself, and only once you have done that, can you make a valid comparison. As a substitute, find some people who are ecstatic about retirement and see what they have done.
    You can’t appreciate fine wine until you have a bit of oenology education, same for retirement.

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