JASMINE BIRTLES: Retirement is increasingly not a "thing" any more

More and more people are looking to carry on working instead of taking retirement

The worst date I ever had was with a British Airways pilot. Ooh, pilot, you may think: there’s go-getting and glamorous. Mmm, right. Well, this particular ‘Nigel’ (cabin crews’ name for a pilot) was as glamorous as a dial tone.

What encapsulated his general Nigelness (sorry to all Nigels reading) was that the best thing about his job, he thought, was the excellent pension package the company offered. He was 40 and the big thing in his life was the state of his retirement. That was an exciting evening.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I believe in putting money aside for one’s future. I spend a lot of time and column inches discussing it and bemoaning the lack of cash that people are squirrelling away. But I’ll admit here: I’m a bit of a hypocrite to do that.

You see, I always say that I’m expecting a retirement full of cruises around the Med and hot and cold running toy boys. But it’s a lie. For a start, what would I do with a toy boy? I wouldn’t know how to play with one. But more fundamentally, if I’m honest, what I’m really intending to do in my ‘retirement’ is to continue working. Basically, I have no intention of retiring…ever.

And it seems I’m not the only one. Retirement is increasingly not a ‘thing’ any more. Truly. That great and glamorous future dream that advertisers love to illustrate with an attractive, white-haired couple gazing into the sunset from a posh cruise ship has not only lost its lustre but, like John Cleese’s parrot, ‘it has ceased to be’.

Fidelity International has found that more than half of adults plan to carry on working in their retirement. It also found that 45% expect to work past the age of 70 and almost 10% planned to keep working into their 80s.

My mum did and she loved it. After decades of teaching she set up a nanny agency and took great joy in running it until the year she passed on, loving her office and enjoying hectoring Saudi princes and European businesspeople about how they were bringing up their children.

I have a college friend who was able to retire in his 40s, having sold his share in a hedge fund for so much money Wonga was asking him for loans. His early retirement lasted six months. He’s now running a hedge fund incubator. It’s not ‘giving back to the community’, but it’s keeping him sane.

Certainly the Generation Zers (the youth of today) are not planning on a retirement any time soon. For a start they don’t see how they can amass enough money to pay for one. Secondly, they’re going to be living so long they’re not sure what they would do with that spare time. Some demographers say that the baby who will live to 200 has already been born. Can you imagine what that little Methuselah would do with his (or more likely her) 135-year retirement? That is a whole lot of knitting.

In fact, it’s already de rigueur to live at least to 100, ideally 120 if you’re going to be really in fashion – like the Frenchwoman (they’re always so stylish) Jeanne Calment, who died at the record-setting 122 at the end of the 1990s. So the idea of aiming for any sort of slowdown before at least 100 seems to me not just daft but terribly old-fashioned.

Also, scientists say that working seems to increase your chances of living even longer than Kirk Douglas. A report from the Stanford Centre for Longevity says that “compared to those who are retired, adults of the same age who work have higher levels of cognitive functioning”. And a 2016 study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health showed that working even one more year beyond retirement age was associated with a 9-11% lower risk of dying during the 18-year study period, regardless of health.

Still, the lure of hanging up your briefcase well before your peers seems to resonate with many, particularly those who belong to the FIRE movement. FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. It’s a noble aim, and involves individuals having the discipline to live on very little early on so they max out their investments and manage to retire in their 40s…or earlier (see page 68 for more).

All fine, so long as you have a clear purpose for those ‘retirement’ years and a way in which you can contribute to society. Spending decades on the golf links is enough to turn anyone nuts. Look what it did to Tiger Woods.

So if you woke up this morning with that sinking feeling as you recalled you have zero in your retirement savings, you can now feel smug. You will be forced to (horrors) have a fulfilling time working for much longer than expected. The only question is: doing what? I’ll let you work that out. 

Jasmine Birtles is a financial journalist and founder of MoneyMagpie.com.

Email her at columnists@moneywise.co.uk, follow her on Twitter at @jasmine or Instagram at A@jasmineirtles