Working past 60 is not always about the money

With the Me Generation already trumpeting slogans like "sixty is the new forty," it is unlikely its members will quietly shuffle off into their twilight years.

Besides, why should they? Many of their predecessors have not.

According to a recent study of retirees sponsored by Putnam Investments, the Boston-based money management firm, one-third of the newly retired (with an average age of 61) returned to work after an eighteen-month retirement.

While collectively they do not earn or work as much as before ‘retiring,’ the working retired—which Putnam estimates at 7 million currently — said they were back in the workforce for the mental stimulation, physical activity, and because it kept them socially connected. More importantly, they saw it as the means to personal fulfillment. They now work because they want to rather than need to. They see their quickly ditched ‘retirements’ as the pause that refreshes—the golden retreat into the final phase of life still years ahead of them.

The results do not surprise sociologist Robert Weiss, author of the recently published, The Experience of Retirement.  His book recounts extensive interviews with eighty-nine men and women immediately prior to and after retirement.

Says Weiss, “Energies in the first year of retirement tend to be directed toward answering the questions: What do I do with myself? How do I make sense of a life in which, if I choose, I have no obligations?”  He found most people — in particular those happiest with their post-career lives — found ways to continue to matter, by continuing to have responsibilities.  “The best way to make that happen,” says Weiss, “is through work.  And if work is to matter, then someone needs to be willing to pay for it.”  He, too, found many retirees returned to at least part-time employment, in addition to their volunteer activities shortly after retirement.

Though two-thirds of the working retired in the Putnam study insisted choice, not financial necessity, motivated their return, finances did play some part, according to Beth Segers, a managing director with Putnam in Boston.

“We asked respondents what they would have done differently if they could turn the clock back.  The universal response? They wished they had pared back their consumption and saved more earlier, especially given fears for future health care costs,” she says. Yet overall, the group was still pretty satisfied with their retirement lifestyle, at least enough so that reining in their current spending was not under consideration.

“Gifts and travel remain key consumption priorities,” reports Segers. “But there’s no indication of when the working retired plan to slow down their working, saving — which they still do — or their spending.”

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