Mitre in fact offers workers a phased-in retirement, with fewer hours and fewer workdays; but they keep a core of "reserves at the ready" like Doreen. Now Doreen has a little extra income so she won't have to dip into her nest egg, and the company doesn't have to worry that "it could lose too much institutional knowledge as its workforce retired," Fetterman explains.
In the same article, Joyce Montgomery of Detroit retired from her job as a counselor at a children's home, after her husband also retired. But soon they "...got tired of sitting around...I wanted to come into the workplace to be around people." So she applied for a part time job at CVS pharmacy, planning on perhaps ten or fifteen hours a week, but now, "she works full time," Fetterman reports. "They look at seniors like it's not a person who needs to work, so you can really depend on them because they like their work more," says Montgomery, 58 years old. This is not "a must," financially, she says, though her old job was.
Another article in USA Today the next day advised that retirees who aren't covered by their former employer's retirement plan might very well spend 20% to 30% of their retirement income on health care, albeit Medicare pays some of those costs. But for a 65-year-old couple retiring with no health care sponsored by their past employers will need an average of $190,000 to pay extra expenses for health insurance - a good reason why many retirees go back to work to pay for those high insurance costs.
Eighty-two-year-old Irving Strauss was forced to retire at 62 from an investor-relations company. "I had savings," he says in an article in Bankrate.com (Phipps, 2003), "we could have gotten along on that, but I wanted something better. I wanted to go out and make another $100,000 a year, so I did." Strauss, president of Strauss Corporate Communications in New York City, is not an exception in terms of what his motivations were in terms of returning...
Irving Strauss, the last example, clearly was set financially when he retired, but he is an example of an energetic older person who couldn't stand the thought of not making all the money he possibly could. He was motivated by a drive to gain financial glory, not just security. Doreen Bellino says she was "kind of retired" but it seems her example is that she knew she was not only wanted, she was needed, and enjoyed the thought of her expertise mattering to Mitre. Joyce Montgomery was bored and is obviously a "people person" who enjoys the company of colleagues in a work environment. The Mary and Alvin Rogers family of Little Rock were not fully prepared for retirement in terms of what they had saved. They needed some income to keep from dipping into their retirement investments. Ken Schwartz says he took "a vacation from retirement" to go back to MidAmerican each summer, so obviously the extra money helped him, but he had been a manager, and its possible he missed the feeling of being in charge of something in a meaningful leadership sense.
Works Cited
Crowson, Aryana. (2006). Early Retirees Head Back to Work. KTHV-TV Retrieved 29 Nov. 2006 at http://www.todaysthv.com/printfullstory.aspx?storyid=37277
Fetterman, Mindy (2006). Retirees back at work, with flexibility. USA Today. Retrieved 29 Nov. 2006 at http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/retirement/2005-06-08-retiree-main_x.htm.
Phipps, Jennie L. (2003). An older worker's guide to getting a job. Retrieved 29 Nov. 2006 at http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/advice/20020924a.asp.
Ryberg, William. (2006). Employees return to work, hassle-free. Des Moines Register. Retrieved 28 Nov. 2006 at http://desmoinesregister.com.
