The Covid Retirement Boom

[Zorba]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this but here is a plot from the St Louis Fed showing the excess of US retirees in the 2020-2022 period versus predictions. If I understand the plot, during this period there were nearly 3 million excess retirements over predictions.

A link to the article, the methods used and the and figure is here: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2023/jun/excess-retirements-covid19-pandemic

 

[Sunset]

No wonder the tourist spots are crowded

 

[Midpack]

I’m not surprised, we heard lots of stories of near retirees who elected to leave or were forced out early when Covid struck. IIRC correctly teachers/school admin, nurses/other medical, flight attendants, and others left the workforce. Many have had to accept a lower standard of retirement living than they’d hoped for. And unemployment has been very low for quite a while now. Guess the chart quantifies that phenomenon.

https://www.aarp.org/work/careers/pandemic-workers-early-retirement/

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opini...heir-jobs-many-probably-should-ve-ncna1287945

 

[Montecfo]

During and post the financial crisis people deferred retirement, as evidenced by higher than trend workforce participation.

Covid helped reverse that.

 

[marko]

No wonder the tourist spots are crowded

No wonder there's 1000 Help Wanted signs everywhere.

A whole Lotta people realized they can live with less and be better for it.

 

[athena53]

No wonder there's 1000 Help Wanted signs everywhere.

A whole Lotta people realized they can live with less and be better for it.

Except sometimes that's true only for the short run. I hope they don't realize at age 75 or so that they're going to outlive their savings.

 

[marko]

Except sometimes that's true only for the short run. I hope they don't realize at age 75 or so that they're going to outlive their savings.

True, but IMO these are folk who don't plan or worry much beyond next Tuesday.

 

[disneysteve]

I was at a medical conference in April and was speaking to the recruiters from one area health system. I asked what impact they’ve seen from COVID. Their immediate answer was “mass retirement”. They lost a large number of physicians due to COVID. Any doctors who were close enough to retirement or were well past that post but still working anyway all pulled the plug. Had COVID hit 2 years later I would have done the same but we weren’t quite ready yet.

 

[USGrant1962]

I was at a medical conference in April and was speaking to the recruiters from one area health system. I asked what impact they’ve seen from COVID. Their immediate answer was “mass retirement”. They lost a large number of physicians due to COVID. Any doctors who were close enough to retirement or were well past that post but still working anyway all pulled the plug. Had COVID hit 2 years later I would have done the same but we weren’t quite ready yet.

The other angle on that is corporations encouraged retirement during Covid. A buddy was a major airline pilot and, when travel when to nothing, his airline offered early retirement packages. IIRC, his package was 70% of standard full-time salary for 5 years (now 2 years to go I think) without working. His biggest concern was that he wouldn't make the cut because all the older pilots would take up all the packages.

 

[wearefinishedworking]

I retired from medical admin earlier than planned a year after Covid. The number of older RNs I saw retiring was unbelievable and a true loss for our medical communities.

 

[Masquernom]

The follow on to this is the work from home/return to office effect. Folks got used to working from home, then when the boss said you have to come to the office, they quit.

 

[Flyfish1]

I was at a medical conference in April and was speaking to the recruiters from one area health system. I asked what impact they’ve seen from COVID. Their immediate answer was “mass retirement”. They lost a large number of physicians due to COVID. Any doctors who were close enough to retirement or were well past that post but still working anyway all pulled the plug. Had COVID hit 2 years later I would have done the same but we weren’t quite ready yet.

I retired from medicine in May of this year - age 59. Had enough and had enough.

 

[MarieIG]

I was at a medical conference in April and was speaking to the recruiters from one area health system. I asked what impact they’ve seen from COVID. Their immediate answer was “mass retirement”. They lost a large number of physicians due to COVID. Any doctors who were close enough to retirement or were well past that post but still working anyway all pulled the plug. Had COVID hit 2 years later I would have done the same but we weren’t quite ready yet.

DIL worked in ICU during the height of COVID. She is young - amazingly she never got COVID - but that time left its mark on her. Part of her job involved telling family that their loved one was dying, and no, they could not be together.

 

[Midpack]

Talk to restaurant managers with careers that include pre and post Covid. They will tell you their jobs changed for the worse, and that hasn’t improved much since Covid. We had comedy of errors bad service at a favorite restaurant a few weeks ago, and the manager was the only one who knew how to handle it, at least three servers, runners were clueless. Our server, who wasn’t around for 90% of our visit, only wanted to make sure we knew it wasn’t her fault Of course runners don’t have any way to know what’s going on.

 

[MarieIG]

DH's retirement was pre-planned - and he retired just before COVID hit our area. (We were arguing about who was going to retire first. I knew he wanted to retire, and pushed him hard to get it done.) He worked in a large building on Madison Ave., in NYC and two of the men that he interacted with daily (security guards) died from COVID and one of his co-workers, with whom he worked closely on a daily basis, was sick for several months. Needless to say, while I was sorry about his co-workers, was very grateful that he was out of that building.

I did not retire earlier because of COVID, but my job became quite unpleasant. I actually postponed retirement due to COVID. (I was not exposed, I used the work as a distraction, and postponed putting our house on the market due to COVID.)

 

[Northforker]

I let my boss know in November 2019 that May 1st, 2020 was my last day. I was 59. Covid came as a complete surprise. The positive aspect of covid is that we delayed a big trip for 2 years and let that money work. The downside was the crowds of people with pent up travel plans has made everything crowded and expensive.

 

[kingkarmann]

My plan had always been to retire in June of 2020.
I worked in auto manufacturing.
Covid hit, since there is no easy way to social distance on an assembly line the decision was made to shut the factory down for eight weeks. Nearly all manufacturers and manufacturer suppliers followed suit.
A buyout was offered to those of us who met a certain threshold of seniority and age.
I easily qualified and joined the ranks of Covid retirees, right on schedule.

 

[zippy2020]

We've been retired since Jan 2010 (we were in our late 50's)and have definitely seen an increase in domestic tourism, since our area is one of the major tourist attractions in the U.S. Many more Boomer retirees have joined our ranks since the lockdowns ended, due to finally reaching or being able to afford to retire.

 

[explanade]

Before the pandemic, there were many threads about how unbearable work had become -- office politics, bosses, coworkers, commute, etc.

During the pandemic, these conditions got worse?

Or more people became aware of them?

 

[audreyh1]

Before the pandemic, there were many threads about how unbearable work had become -- office politics, bosses, coworkers, commute, etc.

During the pandemic, these conditions got worse?

Or more people became aware of them?

I think there was a massive change in outlook and attitudes. People really had to face and assess their situations. Giant wake-up call I suppose.

 

[UpQuark]

The follow on to this is the work from home/return to office effect. Folks got used to working from home, then when the boss said you have to come to the office, they quit.

+1

I was going to retire last year anyway, but if I hadn't been planning to I would have anyway because I did not want to go back into the office and our company got really nasty about making us go back.

One other teammate retired due to not wanting to return to the office, and a third person retired because she didn't want to get vaccinated (tho privately she said she probably would get vaccinated but didn't want to be forced to by our company).

 

[YVRRocketSurgery]

I was planning to retire April 2022 for a long time and thankfully it wasn't derailed by everything over the last few years.

My megacorp actually began trialing remote & hybrid work with small groups during the mid aughts. My contact center department was one of the early innovators within the company. The push came from a variety of factors but business continuity was a biggie. We perviously got hit hard by a worm virus, the CIO got canned, the CEO mandated we focus on strengthening our business continuity resilency, and remote work was one of the ideas.

Technology was one aspect (laptops for everyone, VPN, voip, headsets, webcams/video conf, etc) but policy was another. We treated it as a carrot for the staff. Had to agree to come in a few days/one week a month for training. Also had to agree to give up remote work if your performance metrics were problematic. The staff obviously loved it, particularly the ones that had long commutes in. Personally, I liked coming in and socializing with whoever was in that day but it also helped that I only had a 15 minute commute. I do think going in more regularly and building relationships in person helped my career.
Of course it was next to 100% work from home during the pandemic.

The missus felt the worklife balance my company offered was reasonable and that I should consider continuing to work. But the pressure to constantly produce burned me out so work from home or not, that was it for me.