‘Retiring at 55 was the biggest mistake of my life’

Burdened with a slower pace and tighter finances, more ‘unretirees’ are heading back to work

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Claire Davies had always enjoyed working. She loved the variety, social connection, camaraderie and sense of purpose. So making the decision to retire at 55 wasn’t straightforward.
She spent a stressful year commuting between her home in Taplow, Berkshire, and Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, where her husband was working. And she was doing 10-hour days and working weekends as a detective police constable, while managing a nightmarish, top-to-bottom renovation on the family home.
All of this took its toll. “I was living with no back to the house for months, with no heating, working non-stop for the police and flying back to Abu Dhabi every six weeks for six days,” says Davies, 63. “I couldn’t handle it anymore, so I took early retirement to access my pension.
“But it was the biggest mistake of my life.”
According to a survey by financial services company Canada Life, 40pc of retired people in the UK have some form of retirement regret, including not increasing their pension savings more and making more lifestyle adjustments while in the workforce.
One in 10 Britons said they wouldn’t have left work when they did, if they had known what it was like and wished they had chosen to retire later.
“There’s a lot of research on people’s satisfaction with the transition into retirement,” says Dr. Georg Henning, a psychologist at the German Centre of Gerontology in Berlin.
“Consistently, between 10pc and 25pc say it was hard for them to adjust to the retired life or they report their wellbeing worsened after retirement – or they just miss their job and thought it would be different after they stopped.”
Accepting you’re no longer part of the workforce is hard for all kinds of workers. However, Henning says there’s little research into the retirees who regret retiring.
“Retirement is the official transition into old age for many people, where society dictates that you’ve worked enough, which can be hugely difficult to accept,” says Henning. “While many retirees prepare financially, less is done to prepare their social contacts and networks and pave the way for a fulfilling life and structure once they stop working.”
Many people don’t sit with this specific breed of regret – they seek jobs to fit into this new chapter, reversing their retirement decision, often known as unretiring.
Studies conducted over the last decade show that 5pc to 20pc of retirees in the UK have unretired. Rates are likely to increase over the coming decade as people live longer and lack the funds to retire comfortably for good. Not to mention the fact that many people would rather work than not work at all.
In the first academic study to examine unretirement in a UK population sample, researchers from King’s College London found that 9pc of Britons unretired within the first year of retiring, with the mean time to unretirement being 2.4 years after.
The chances of unretiring declined to inconsequential levels within 10 years of leaving the labour force. Results also showed that men were 25pc more likely to unretire than women.
Davies hoped she would unretire in Abu Dhabi. But her extensive secretarial experience in the hospitality and marketing industries, which she developed before joining the police force, didn’t count for much – especially as she was there on her husband’s work visa. In 2022, Davies, her husband and their son, then aged 22, moved back to Berkshire.
It didn’t take long for her to secure work as a marketing assistant at a property company but staffing issues led to her redundancy. Her confidence took a nosedive.
Then came a distressing dry spell. Between May 2023 and October 2024, Davies applied to 142 part-time roles and took part in under 20 interviews. “It was so hard relearning all these techniques. And a lot of the interviews were over Zoom, which doesn’t bring out the best in me,” she explains. “It was a slog and sometimes I’d just go to my bed and cry.”
The feedback Davies received from recruiters was always positive – her CV was “varied” and “different” – but they felt she was under-qualified or overqualified. Often, she knew they had given the role to someone younger.
“My husband was exasperated because he thought he would retire when we were back in the UK and I would be the one working,” she says. “Yet I’d tried every which way – being myself, not myself, being cheerful, then quiet and professional – nothing was enough.”
Both Davies and her husband have a police pension, hers accrued between the ages of 33 and 55. They paid off the mortgage on their house 12 years ago and are frugal with money.
“We’re really lucky, and financially, we’re firmly middle class,” she says. “But paying for emergency costs, like an unexpected dental procedure or fixing a broken appliance, would have us overdrawn.”
Plus, her nephew is getting married in her native New Zealand next year, which the family couldn’t pay for without dipping into savings.
Alongside applying for part-time roles and doing courses on topics such as customer service and business administration, Davies tried a different approach.
After posting on local Facebook groups, she found work as a cleaner and dog carer for several clients. The pay is £18 an hour, better than the receptionist (£12 per hour) or administrator roles (£13 an hour) she had been applying for. Now, Davies has been offered a part-time role as an administrator.
“They’re a lovely team and I’m over the moon,” she says. “And the best thing is, I’ve switched off all the notifications from recruitment companies and LinkedIn, which was such a relief.”
As with Davies, a major change in Jan Fox’s life prompted her retirement. After a successful 15-year stint in Los Angeles combining acting work and journalism, she was burnt out and keen to be closer to friends and family in the UK.
“While other people were learning to bake bread and play the clarinet during lockdown, I was non-stop working from home, which was psychologically exhausting,” she explains. “So quite serendipitously and without overthinking it, I decided to move to Holywood in Belfast, retire and write a book.”
At 67, Fox was above the average retirement age for women in the UK (it was 64.3 in 2022), and felt she had earned her pension, accrued during her print journalism career.
However, around six months in, Fox was “bored silly” and hating retirement. She’d finished writing her book, so she wrote another – although she had struggled to find a publisher.
“I just didn’t feel like I was living and was getting more and more depressed,” she explains. “I don’t have a husband, kids and grandkids like a lot of my friends, so family life wasn’t my priority.”
Having always been defined by her busy and creative working life, she needed more stimulation than the garden centres and coffee shops her retired friends were visiting with their husbands.
As much as not working didn’t suit her, neither did the lack of a steady income. With the cost of living skyrocketing, she had to start spending her savings to cover the basics.
“It was much harder to live on a pension and a bit of savings than I thought, and I didn’t want to be sitting in one room with a bar of the electric fire on,” she says.
Recognising that she still had the energy to fill her life with work – provided she paced herself – Fox began experimenting in new mediums.
Now 71, her portfolio career includes working as a radio DJ at the classic hits station Belfast89, writing questions for a popular TV quiz show, public speaking and being an extra in TV shows.
Following in the footsteps of her mother, who graduated with a degree from the Open University at 83, Fox has started a part-time MA in creative writing at Queen’s University Belfast, with the end goal of teaching creative writing courses.
“I think any kind of creative person never really wants to retire – look at all the actors on stage until they die on the job,” she says. “I’m producing creative work and excited to do so – who knows what else there might be in me? It really is never too late. I’ve got this mad idea that I’d like to record an album of jazz standards next.”
Henning points out that while the conditions surrounding retirement, such as the pension system and views on aging, have changed significantly, people are still as well-adjusted to retirement as they were several decades ago.
“That said, everything is getting more individualised – not everyone in a cohort retires at the same age and at the same time anymore,” he explains. “You’re on your own to decide the point you retire, which can make the acceptance of this transition much harder.”
Paul Ollinger, who retired from Facebook aged 42, can attest to this. He was one of the company’s first 250 employees, working as the vice president of West Coast sales, running a third of the company’s revenue through his team. It was a massive job with plenty of stress.
Living in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife and children, his retirement started off well – he enjoyed driving his children to school, exercising every day, taking vacations, catching up with old friends and reading the books that had been stacking up on his bedside table. He particularly appreciated playing a meaningful role in the lives of his elderly parents.
“But then a year went by and I was like – what am I doing? Who am I? I had a crisis of identity,” he says. “I was isolated and alone – albeit in very good circumstances with my family around me, but work had provided me with so many different social outlets.”
He missed being part of a team, and interacting with “smart, interesting and motivated people, who were fun to be around”.
He remembers being proud when he could say he worked at Facebook, but during retirement, people’s questions weighed.
“There’s an ambiguity that comes when you’re retired – or just between things. Someone asks what you do and you’re like: holy hell, I don’t know how to answer this question,” he explains.
After two years retired, Ollinger took a job at a small software company, ignoring his dream to pursue a career in stand-up comedy – he’d been bitten by the bug almost a decade before.
“I spent a year at the software company, but it didn’t work out,” he explains. “I saw it as a gift I’d been given to do what I really wanted, so I started writing every day and going to open mic nights again – very slowly, I’ve been able to build myself into a modestly successful stand-up comedian.”
Now, he tours the US with his stand-up shows, speaks at corporate events for brands Coca-Cola and Cox Automotive. And he hosts his podcast, Crazy Money, about the role of money in our lives, with past guests including LL Cool J, Judd Apatow and Oliver Burkeman.
He owns shares in Meta – “more than a devotee of portfolio theory would say is wise, but far less than I wish I had hung on to, given its amazing run over the past decade”.
But retirement hasn’t been a shock to the system. “I’m on a fraction of what I was earning at Facebook, but provided I’m not extravagant, having enough money shouldn’t be an issue,” he adds.
In September, Ollinger and his family moved from Georgia to New York so he could be closer to the comedy circuit.
“I’ve realised the dream isn’t not to work – the dream is to work on my own terms, doing work that’s meaningful, fulfilling and for me, in the service of others,” says Ollinger. “Working in something new after retirement is going to be hard, but over time, people will understand and respect it – even if it’s not the traditional route.”