Will You Want Or Need To Work Past Age 65?

February 08, 2019

Many of us work with two kinds of coworkers – those who say they can’t wait to retire and those who swear they love their jobs so much they plan to die at their desks. I get the first group. Who doesn’t want to retire to a life of leisure without alarm clocks, meetings, conference calls, or commuting in traffic?

The second group, however, I view with a somewhat skeptical eye. Sure, some of us have dream jobs that we can’t wait to dive into every day and we would be very happy working in them until we are simply unable to do so. But when it comes to working past “normal” retirement age (let’s call it 65 since that is when Medicare kicks in for American workers), how many of us are going to work that long because we truly want to, and how many of us are masking the reality that we might actually need to work well into retirement age due to financial reasons?

Know your numbers

Even if you are unsure as to which of these two camps you may find yourself, a good first step for all of us is to periodically run a retirement income projection to estimate how much of our pre-retirement income we could potentially replace at retirement time. Knowing how much income we could potentially generate for ourselves in the future across a variety of potential retirement ages can help us plan not only for the retirement lifestyle we prefer, it can also help us plan for the possibility that life may hand us a giant bucket of lemons and force us to retire earlier than expected due to unforeseen events, such as a health issue or a late career downsizing.

If you work with a financial planner, ask him or her to give you an estimate of your future retirement income, or you can use the retirement estimator calculator to do it yourself. You will also want to get an update of your future Social Security retirement benefit amounts from the Social Security Administration at www.ssa.gov.

Employee engagement after 65

A major concern among both employers and workers is just how engaged we are likely to be in our work past age 65. Exactly what does it mean to be engaged on the job? According to an Aon Hewitt study, employee engagement describes the level of an employee’s psychological investment in their organization rather than simply showing up and going through the motions to collect a paycheck.

If you truly are engaged in your job, and you love what you do, where you do it, and with whom you do it with, then you are in your happy place career-wise and should certainly keep working as long as you wish. But what if someday you become that less-than-engaged worker, yet you aren’t ready or can’t yet afford to retire? What are your options then?

Attractive alternatives

You could try to hang on longer and maybe find a way to love your currently uninspiring position, but that seems like a disservice to both you and your employer. Instead, you could contemplate a late-career job change to something you do love that engages you more fully. This proposition is not as scary as it may seem. According to the New Careers for Older Workers study conducted by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), 82% of survey respondents not only made a successful career change after age 45, but many of them also received higher earnings.

As an alternative, you could also restructure your lifestyle to live on less. This way, you could successfully retire from a job where you’ve lost that lovin’ feeling without prematurely draining your retirement savings.