As I ponder my plans for early retirement in 2027 I’ve been thinking more about why people continue to work. Not just people who are nearing or thinking of retirement but people in general. I suppose these thoughts have entered my head because I want to leave no stone unturned in my consideration of eventually walking away from my career around the age of 57. Of course, I’m not just walking away from my career. I’m also walking towards the next phase of my life. But the impact of my decision is not the purpose of this article. Rather, I want to consider whether there are any good reasons for me to continue working past the age of 57. Contemplation has lead me to the four main reasons to keep working that I’ve listed below.
- Needing the money to cover immediate needs.
- Furthering some future goal that requires a large sum of money.
- Maintaining an identity or status associated with work.
- Fulfilling a real or perceived obligation, monetary or otherwise.
Needing The Money
This probably applies to most people including those just starting out in their careers or people whose situation has them living paycheck to paycheck. Two times I can think of being in this place were at the start of my post-college life in my twenties and in my mid-forties after an expensive and painful divorce. In my twenties my income ranged from roughly $20,000 in the first part of that decade and roughly $45,000 in the past few years of that decade. At that time I didn’t have much in savings, almost no investments and my main concern was having money to spend on weekends or to go on the occasional trip with my friends. The divorce in my mid-forties was a time when I’d surrendered more than half the wealth I had gained over the past fifteen years, took on a child support obligation that would last twelve years and was forced to start over after selling the home I thought I’d own for a long time. Coming out of my twenties I moved on to furthering future goals and I was still in that phase when the divorce knocked me back into a paycheck to paycheck rebuilding process.
There’s no shame in needing the money from your job to get by. I do think people need to have a goal to move on from that phase. Sadly, I have siblings who after decades have not moved on from that phase. A person can get stuck there for sure, especially with the strong pull of the need for instant gratification and readily available debt options. I’m glad that I didn’t get stuck back there in my mid-forties. It was demoralizing to be back living paycheck to paycheck again after working my way out of it in my thirties. Knowing that I had moved on before helped give me the confidence to once again move to a place where I could focus on furthering future goals. These days I’m far beyond needing pay from work to cover basic needs and don’t see this as any kind of motivation to keep working beyond age 57.
Furthering Future Goals
When I hit my thirties my income improved by almost 100% and for the first time in my life I was able to save and invest for the future. I think that this is a place that many people get to in their thirties. Things like wanting to buy their first home, pay for a wedding and honeymoon, and starting a family are on people’s minds. Some think of saving for the cost of earning an advanced degree or perhaps taking a dream vacation. Some people may have more practical needs like saving to pay for medical needs of a chronically ill family member. I know that at some point in my thirties most of those things were on my mind. As I moved into my late thirties thoughts of paying for my kids college and eventual retirement added motivation. I believe that that motivation from this phase is what drives people to be the most productive in their careers. I know during this phase I have worked the hardest and stayed the most focused on my goals. It’s also a phase where at times I’ve experienced the most frustration and disappointment when setbacks seemed to push my dreams farther away.
As I mentioned above divorce knocked me out of this phase and back into a paycheck to paycheck life for a while. I committed myself to getting back on track though. Two years after my divorce was final I had put myself back onto solid footing working towards a goal of once again owning a home and restarting my plans for retirement. This phase is where I’ve been for almost a decade and my estimation is that by the end of 2026 I will likely have secured assets that can meet my future needs without continuing to work. That being the case I don’t see this as a reason to continue working beyond the age of 57.
Maintaining An Identity Or Status
I don’t have much personal experience with this phase but there have been a couple of brief periods in my career when identity played a part in my motivation to work. One time was when I served in the US Military. The pay is not great in the military and the work can range from monotonous to dangerous, but there is a certain amount of recognition conferred upon those who serve their country. I felt that at times for sure. I have also witnessed the satisfaction of gaining an identity or status from work in others and I’ve studied it intently. There have also been times in my career when I wanted to have a certain title, which usually confers a level of status on a person, or to be seen as a leader by my co-workers. Eventually I got to a place where I understood that such feelings are only ever temporary and often carry more weight in a person’s mind than the importance in reality. I’ve seen quite a few people in my career who are not necessarily great at what they do, but they clearly enjoy the preferential treatment they receive due to their title and status. Some of these people are in appointed government positions where people around them fear the implications of not giving those people just deference. People in those positions feel that power and most seem to enjoy it. Even if they have more than enough money to meet their day-to-day needs or future aspirations, giving up their work means giving up their status and relinquishing their professional identity. The psychological boost people in this phase receive from being treated with respect and deference is extremely difficult to relinquish.
This phase doesn’t always apply to people who enjoy power though. Some people simply gain a sense of purpose from their careers or the companies they work for. I experienced this after my military service while working for a dynamic start-up company. I certainly didn’t have a feeling of power in that position but I did feel like I was doing something unique and important while working with that company. After a few years the feeling passed. Eventually I really stopped caring about what people thought of me beyond my clients and co-workers valuing the job that I do. I think that the need to maintain an identity or status is one of the more powerful factors that keep people working past a time when they could (or perhaps should) retire. Athletes and entertainers who’ve reached a high level in their fields come to mind as those who feel the urge to keep going because nothing can replace the feeling of being on stage or performing on the field of play. I think that this phase represents a great trap as it can be devastating for a person relying on their professional identity or status to lose that unexpectedly rather than at a time when they are psychologically ready to move on. For me this is surely not a reason to continue working past the age of 57.
Fulfilling An Obligation
Obligations to work can take various different forms but include things like formal contracts, military service obligations, requirements related to receiving certain compensation or simply what one considers a moral obligation to a particular company. People in very high value positions or professions often find themselves obligated by a contract, if not obligated to work for a certain company then limited in working for competitors if they do leave that company. I’ve no experience with that but I have experienced obligations related to military service and with regard to compensation. Military service is unique in that a person incurs specific obligations of time served that can be very difficult to get out of without some mitigating factor intervening. For me it was a simple proposition since I served to the end of my required time and decided to separate and return to civilian life. Since the military does offer pensions for people serving a certain amount of years there is a monetary factor that comes into play if a person has put in a certain number of years counting on their pension at the end. People who work in heavily union and civil service professions (such as police, fire fighters and EMTs) tend to deal with the same issue regarding time served and pension eligibility.
Some people will count on a pension as the cornerstone of their financial plan in retirement and that makes the obligation to serve at a particular company a strong one. The promise of a pension is an ironic one in that it’s designed in part to encourage loyalty to a particular company but it also often encourages people who’ve been working for a long time to stay in a job and do the minimum to qualify for their pension. There’s a phrase quiet quitting that refers to people who show up at work and merely go through the motions of their job without seeking to actually contribute in a meaningful way. I can see how the promise of a pension would lead to quiet quitting since pensions usually require decades of service to qualify for. Another way that compensation is used to create an obligation is via a vesting schedule for certain types of deferred compensation. This is something I have experience with. One company I was with granted shares in the private company that had the promise of being worth more in the future. The way vesting worked with those was each time shares were granted, the shares became actually owned by the person (vested) at a rate of 25% per year. Once vested those shares could potentially be converted to cash by sale to others in the company who wanted to buy them or via the stock market if the company should go public. (It didn’t.) At another company I worked for their 401(k) matching and profit sharing deposits didn’t fully vest until a person was with the company for five years. So basically if a person were to receive matching and profit sharing deposits and then leave the company within five years then the appropriate portion of those deposits would revert back to the company.
The final type of obligation I’ll note relates to a perceived necessity for a person to continue working for a company due to the possibility that departure would cause catastrophic consequences for the business. A person who might feel this way is what I would call a linchpin for a particular company. It could be someone like a company founder or high-level executive. Or it could be a person who happens to have either key skills or key contacts that the company relies on. I’ve no experience with this personally but I have known people who were considered to be key to a company’s success. Sometimes it was real and sometimes it was imagined. At this point in my career none of the above types of obligations concern me so this is not a factor that would cause me to hesitate in making the decision to retire early.
Final Thoughts
There is one other possibility I’ve considered as a strong reason for people to keep working. I think it’s a pretty rare one all by itself though. That would be a person just loving their job so much that even though nothing else is holding them there they still want to continue working. I see this rare feeling as a very different thing from the honeymoon period that people experience when they move to a new employer or a new field altogether. I’m thinking of people who’ve been doing a certain kind of work for many years and still have greatly positive feelings toward it. I’ve known a very few people who’ve expressed this type of feeling for their work. One thing I do know for sure is that is not me. There may be other reasons for continuing to work that I’ve overlooked but I can’t think of any reasons that would apply to me.
Having considered all of the above I still find that I don’t have any good reason to work beyond the age of 57. That could change between now and the end of 2026 when I plan to retire. At present though, I feel that my consideration of early retirement makes sense. Hopefully this article gets you to thinking about your motivation to work in a particular job or career and informs you about your prospects for retirement, early or otherwise.
In The Midst Of A Journey 