Never Retire - Would It Kill You To Retire?

New academic research helps answer that question

As an ongoing feature of the Never Retire newsletter, we review academic articles that cover our areas of focus.

Researchers do a lot of work on the health and mortality consequences of retirement, therefore there’s almost always a fresh and informative article to look at.

In today’s free installment, we briefly review an article just published in Research on Aging, titled Would It Kill You to Retire? Testing Short/Long Term/Recurrent Effects of Retirement on All-Cause Mortality Risk.

At the link, you’ll probably only see an abstract. I’m paying for a service that gives me free access to academic articles behind paywalls.

In any event, the big challenge with research on the health and mortality consequences of retirement is looking at the circumstances around retirement. Often, health issues lead to retirement. So, to get a true gauge on how retirement itself can directly impact health, you need to control for forced retirement due to health and consider individuals who retire when healthy and by choice.

The present study considers if health issues prompted retirement in the sample. It also attempts to differentiate between types and timing of health issues (e.g., trouble with mobility and level of health leading into and after retirement).

By doing this, the researchers hope to “newly ascertain that retirement effects on health can be immediate, and that resulting changes in mortality are independent of physical health.” In other words, is there a direct relationship between retirement and mortality?

With that in mind, on to the results.

The research looked to test two key “propositions”:

• “retirement impacts mortality differently over time”

• “retirement significantly impacts mortality immediately after retirement, independently of changes in physical health.”

To do this, the researchers used a sample of 7,747 women and 7,958 men from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a longitudinal study conducted in the United States.

In the overall sample, forced retirement due to health was more common than non-health reasons for retirement.

In both the male and female samples, relative to working, non-health retirement significantly increased morality risk, by 51.1 percent for males and 27.1 percent for women. Not surprisingly, retirement forced by health significantly increased mortality risk, by roughly 220 percent for both men and women.

Bringing all of the models used in the study together, the researchers concluded “that negative retirement effects on mortality take hold in a few years, in ways that do not involve physical morbidities” (e.g., issues with mobility and performing day-to-day activities) and that “non-health retirement induces psycho-social changes for men, such as” loss of identity and fewer fulfilling activities and routines.

It’s also interesting to note that, among the study’s sample, “Non-health retirement at age 62 or younger does not make any difference and it is not until age 65 or older that it increases mortality risk.

This finding adds to the aforementioned challenge with this type of research—determining changes/declines in health that would have happened anyway versus those directly influenced or triggered by non-health retirement.

As with most research like this, it’s an ongoing puzzle. One I enjoy following. We’ll continue to follow it together in future installments of the newsletter. We might even go back to this particular study as it contained other interesting data and findings best left for another day.

Our next set of newsletter posts will be a series that details a Never Retire checklist, focused on investments, savings, work, where you live, how much it costs to live there, and physical and mental health.

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As always, thank you for reading and supporting my work as a freelance writer.

I appreciate it.

Rocco