Retirement Not Stimulating Enough? Unretire

Editor’s note: This article is part of The Great Unretirement, a Next Avenue initiative made possible by the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation and EIX, the Entrepreneur Innovation Exchange.

Connie Inukai taught technical writing at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University for roughly 40 years before she retired. But she didn't leave her 9-to-5 job to travel, golf, spend time with her grandchildren or any of the other common retirement tropes — she had much bigger plans. At age 70, Inukai launched a business: She invented Tip and Split, a restaurant calculating device with a magnifier and light for older people who have trouble reading the small print on menus.

Since then, Inukai, now 76, has started a new project ("Write Your Selfie," which helps people tell their life story in pictures) and written two books. She says that part of her inspiration to kick off part two of her career post-retirement was that she saw her students make higher salaries straight out of college than she was with her decades of experience. But she also just loves to stay active.

"I love what I do," says Inukai, who is based in Washington, D.C. "I wake up every morning excited about what to do next. The main reason is you keep mentally active, physically active, socially active. I would never be happy just watching Netflix all day long. I'm learning constantly, and that inspires me."

Inukai isn't alone in her so-called unretirement. The COVID-19 pandemic upended the global labor market, putting many people out of work, including those who may not have been planning to retire at the time.

As of August 2023, there were just over 2.4 million "excess retirements" due to the pandemic — more than half of the 4.2 million people who exited the workforce from the beginning of the pandemic to the second quarter of 2021, according to a research paper by Miguel Faria-e-Castro, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

But soon after, these older Americans appeared to trickle back into the labor force. A survey conducted in the summer of 2022 for T. Rowe Price's Retirement Saving & Spending Study found that roughly 20% of retirees were working either full- or part-time, and 7% were looking for employment.

We're back to around the same number of people "unretiring" as we saw pre-pandemic, says Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, a Research Fellow at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

"It tends to be that people come back when it's very easy to do so, like when there are a lot of job openings," Sanzenbacher says. That was certainly the case right after the pandemic, when there was a labor shortage. But the trend is still apparent. An online survey conducted in June 2024 of 1,500 American ages 62 to 85 by Caring.com — an online information platform for caregivers of aging parents, spouses and other loved ones — found that one in three of employed older adults re-entered the workforce after retiring.

Sometimes, people make the turnaround out of necessity. Roughly half (48%) of respondents to T. Rowe Price's survey who were working in retirement felt as though they had to for financial reasons. Caring.com's survey similarly found that more than half of "unretired" older adults cited inflation and the increasing cost of living as a main reason for returning to work.

But others want to give back to the community or stay active. In fact, Sanzenbacher says that he finds it's "a little bit less financial and is oftentimes mindset focused" as evidenced by factors like the fact that we don't see a surge of people unretiring a lot when the stock market drops.

Instead, he says people often retire, then don't enjoy it as much as they thought they would, and return to the labor market when they're able to do so.

Often, a desire to give back to the community and to stay active culminate in entrepreneurship. Bridget Weston, chief executive at SCORE, a resource partner of the Small Business Administration that provides free mentoring and education to current and aspiring small business owners, says that while the trend toward entrepreneurship was happening before the pandemic, there's specifically been a spike since COVID appeared.

"What we've seen is people who were retired are being more and more drawn to entrepreneurship," Weston says. "It's a way to stay active, it's a way to stay connected and, frankly, they have experience and knowledge and wisdom to share and put to good use."

Inukai is a prime example. She embraced entrepreneurship later in life so much so that she trademarked a name for herself: Grandmapreneur. Not only is Inukai continuing to work on inventing and marketing her own projects, but she's also helping others do the same.

She wrote "Retirement: Dream Big, Take Action and Make Money," which is about people who, like her, started businesses later in life, as well as "How I Got My Product on QVC, The Today Show, The View, and More . . . in Retirement" about her marketing efforts and how others can emulate them.

"I loved my job and I was good at it," Inukai says, reflecting on her time as a teacher. But she is still putting those skills to good use seven years after retiring.