Never Retire - When One Spouse Retires, But The Other Doesn't
Reviewing a brand new research article on the subject
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With that in mind, an article out of Australia titled, Retirement routes and the well-being of retirees, just hit the journal, Empirical Economics.
It touched on several areas related to retirement, however the most important part might be the effect one spouse’s retirement has on the other.
Before we go there, let’s consider the other findings.
First, the research focused on the construct of subjective well-being. Previous shows that, generally, retirement has a positive effect on subjective well-being.
In the present article, for men, retirement had an insignificant impact on life satisfaction. For women, the impact was positive and significant, though the significance of the finding was not strong.
Getting to our focus, the research discovered that compared to being single, individuals in partnerships reported decidedly higher subjective well-being.
In addition—
Home ownership and especially outright ownership, in comparison with mortgagees, experience greater SWB relative to renters, other factors equal. This latter effect may reflect the positive influence of wealth on SWB, and it may also reflect greater financial and housing security associated with home ownership.
Make sense.
Even though I’m not a proponent of home ownership from a personal perspective in my current situation, it’s no surprise that being free and clear of a housing payment would positively impact subjective well-being.
After a quick review of the relevant literature, the authors of the current study note—
Collectively, these studies demonstrate that one partner's retirement has a significant impact on the other partner's labour supply and health…
While most research has focused on the SWB consequences of one's own retirement, it is reasonable to expect that retirement may affect the well-being of other family members through externalities related to sharing the same residence, having common income and being exposed to similar stressors. One spouse's retirement may affect the well-being of the other spouse due to changes in financial circumstances and non-monetary considerations, such as changes in the amount of time spent together and participating in social activities.
Here are the findings in this respect—
The evidence in panel (B) suggests that retired husbands are positively impacted by their wife's retirement. In contrast, panel (C) shows that the life satisfaction of working women is negatively affected by their husbands' retirement.
Taken together, this tells me that, within the confines of one person working and the other not working, life satisfaction is higher when both spouses end up retiring.
This makes sense given that social activities and interaction might increase with both spouses in retirement.
It’s interesting to consider this in a Never Retire scenario.
If you’re spouse works a 9-to-5 job and you’re retired, you might experience some psychological or even relationship-related discord.
The non-working spouse could get bored, even lonely. The working spouse might not like having to leave the house each day to participate in the grind, particularly as they get older.
This is one reason why we stress the idea of finding the right work. And, quite often, that’s work that’s flexible, work you can do for yourself, or both.
Sounds obvious, but we don’t always think in these terms, especially if we work traditional jobs. We all know people in, say, “desk jobs” who run the numbers and say I’ll work just two more years. Two years passes and they decide to do two more. And so on.
Before you know it, you’re doing the 9-to-5, five days a week, when you’re 65.
The time to make the change is as soon as possible, particularly if you know you’re going to have to work—at some level—during your traditional retirement years.
Situate yourself to have options now. Not at the last minute, when the transition might be hasty and, at worst, next to impossible.
I’m a freelance writer so I have an incredibly flexible schedule. My girlfriend can get busy, but, by and large, she sets her own schedule. She can schedule herself on certain days of the week or certain times of the day. If she wanted to scale back by a day, it’s something she can do.
Neither of us are conditioned for that scene you see so often on TV shows and movies. The busy couple getting set to leave the house for work in the morning. After one spouse takes a quick bite out of a piece of toast, they kiss the other spouse and probably won’t see them for a good ten hours.
When this is a five-day-a-week thing, most weeks of the year, you run the risk of it impacting the relationship.
The flexibility to not have to function in this traditional way leads lots of people to make career changes, such as going freelance.
There’s nothing I love more than lying in bed with my girlfriend on a day where I’m not going to work—or work much—because we have plans together. In that hour we spend drinking coffee and reading the news, I sometimes pull my laptop out and get a decent amount of work done.
It feels good. It’s not this hastened scene we see so often in the above-mentioned depictions.
Instead, our work ebbs and flows. One or both of us might hit it hard for a day, two, or even three, but there’s that flexibility naturally built that provides time for ourselves and one another. And it’s all a function of the type of work we do and the arrangements we do it under.
Which takes us back to the study—
We also see that a wife's voluntary retirement positively affects the social activities of retired husbands (while involuntary retirement is associated with not change in social engagements). A comparable effect on social engagements is found for retired wives when their husband retired. Finally, we observe that leisure satisfaction of a working wife increases with the voluntary retirement of his husband.
Therefore, if you’re going to have to work past traditional retirement age, it might make sense to do work that allows continued social engagement between you and your partner as well as outside of the relationship.
It’s one thing to not have time for anything but work in your twenties, thirties, or forties (though I don’t advocate it), using the excuse that you’re setting yourself up to be set when you’re old.
It’s another to have to do this in your fifties, sixties, and beyond.
If you have discovered that you’ll Never Retire, what type of work can you do to ensure that you’ll have time for things other than work?
Or that the work you do can be done while lying in bed or on the road. Or that you can schedule that work efficiently enough so you’ll have time for the social activities and engagement we all need as individuals and in partnerships.