Study after study has shown that people are ‘unretiring’ or pushing back retirement by several years.

Many have complained they cannot 'afford' to retire, at least not yet.

A new piece of research from HSBC Life this week suggests that 43% of advised clients expect to carry on working in some kind of paid employment after normal retirement age.

And that’s just advised clients, who are arguably the best prepared for retirement. For those without an adviser the figures are likely to be much higher.

The question here is: are people who are still working actually retired? Can you be both retired and employed at the same time?

Sure, you can do a little part-time work to top up your pension. You can convince yourself you are ‘phasing’ retirement, gradually winding down but taking account of the fact that the pension you expected three years ago may not be quite enough to buy the comforts you want. In any event, there are choices to be made and these are not easy choices in a retirement landscape that looks very different to only three years ago.

There is no doubt that the past few years have been something of a retirement earthquake, a perfect storm of all the wrong conditions blowing pre-retirees off course. With this in mind, it’s perfectly understandable that people have ‘reset’ their retirement plans.

It’s worth remembering that we’ve gone from CPI inflation of 0.6% in Nov 2022 to 4.6% now after a painful peak of over 10%. Most people considering retirement in 2020 could not have expected that food prices alone would be 20% to 30% higher in only three years. Their pensions simply buy less.

Interest rates have also risen from 0.1% in December 2021 to 5.25% now. For those still with mortgages that's a big dent in the pocket.

Of course we’ve also had the pandemic over the same period which left millions furloughed and caused huge social and community upheaval, not to mention the emotional pain of bereavement and illness.

It’s no wonder in 2023 that retirement is not always a top priority for many people - they must be shell-shocked by the events of the last few years and struggling to reassess their plans.

The surveys never really get into the question of whether all this working past retirement age is a temporary phenomenon or permanent. My guess is, a bit like remote working, it’s going to be least a semi-permanent feature of the retirement landscape.

With an ageing population and a desire by the government to encourage more older people to work for longer I suspect that the days of retiring into 30 years of unemployed retirement bliss are coming to an end.

The new working pensioners will be a new generation, better off than before but with new challenges and issues to deal with. Above all they will need good financial advice.

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Kevin O’Donnell is editor of Financial Planning Today and a journalist with 40 years of experience in finance, business and mainstream news. This topical comment on the Financial Planning news appears most weeks, usually on Fridays but occasionally other days. Follow @FPT_Kevin