Qantas captain Geoff Blore was 61 years old and in the sweet spot of a stellar 36-year airline career, thoroughly enjoying his work and loving life, when he suddenly slammed into COVID-19 in early 2020. The company grounded about 100 aircraft, retired its six remaining Boeing 747s, restructured, recapitalised and then offered redundancies to more than 200 of its pilots. “We didn’t know when the pandemic might end, and when we’d be able to go back,” Blore says today. “I’d been there so long, I thought maybe I should apply for the redundancy payout and take an early retirement. That felt like a good idea. I didn’t play golf or fish but I thought I could travel with my wife and go flying with my son, and that would work out well.”
Unfortunately, it didn’t. Blore’s partner, a midwife, was out working long hours and his son told him he wasn’t interested in flying lessons or a flying career after growing up with a father who was either always away or, when home, was too busy studying. As a result, Blore, who describes himself as a driven A-type personality, spent every day home alone with absolutely nothing to do.
“I was there by myself and I basically drank the place dry,” says Blore, now 67 and living in Newcastle, NSW. “I felt so frustrated by everything. Our children had moved out, my wife was away and it was a pretty average time, not good at all. I felt as though my life was all over; that it was the end of the world.
“A lot of my identity was tied up in my work but I suddenly went from Captain Geoff Blore to plain old Geoff Blore. It was such a brutal change and it leads you down a bit of a dark path, and you just get a bit lost.”
Early retirement is a dream many people cherish of a life prematurely free from the daily grind and the stress of meetings, emails and deadlines, but too often it turns into a nightmare void with nothing to do, nowhere to be and no one for company to while away those vast stretches of empty time. Often, people might think vaguely of playing more golf, going on regular fishing trips, taking up aquarobics, buying a gym membership, learning a musical instrument, driving a campervan around Australia and spending more time with grandchildren, but usually the reality comes as a shock.
Nick Freedman, a former high-performance coach and leadership development consultant, was sought out by many clients who’d faced difficulties in adjusting to their post-retirement lives. He built the company Retire On Purpose to help people prepare for this critical change of life. In Freedman’s professional experience, fewer than 10 per cent of people have thought about retirement past having enough money to live on. “Beyond that, people say they might do some renos or go on a cruise, but that doesn’t prepare them at all for what’s ahead,” Freedman says. “So I ask them if they know anyone who left their career and took retirement and experienced loneliness, boredom, loss of identity, had a heart attack or got really depressed or even committed suicide. Most will say yes.
“People don’t realise how much of their identity is wrapped up in their job. You go from being a busy person with a sense of purpose and identity to nothing. It’s a massive shock to the system from a neuroscientific aspect. People have been running fast for decades, with adrenal overload and heightened cortisol levels, going at 110 kilometres an hour, then suddenly slam on the brakes and get whiplash and a huge jolt to their system, but expect everything to be fine. It’s quite crazy, really.”
Blore navigated the initial shock of retirement to find ways to have a sense of satisfaction and self-worth after deciding what was important in his life. As a result, he’s dabbled in investing and is now a convenor with the Australian Shareholders’ Association. Blore is originally from the far west of NSW, so he’s also been back there helping farmers struggling with a shortage of workers, driving headers and cotton pickers, and shearing. In Newcastle, he volunteers with the food rescue charity OzHarvest.
About 156,000 Australians aged 45 and over retired in 2024-25, according to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data, at an average age of 63.8 years. Last year, 1.6 million people had already retired, while another 2.5 million are expected to join them by 2035. Most Baby Boomers and Generation Xers intend to retire at 65.6 years, slightly up from 2022-23’s 65.4 years, part of a trend of people retiring later and relying on their superannuation and then their government pension when they hit 67.
For Anne Wrigley, early retirement came about due to a combination of her employer, Victoria’s Department of Education, wanting to lay off some public servants and her own desire to retire at 57. But the former finance worker also found it hard.
“You retire early but all the people you know are still working, so you don’t have other people to talk to and you become very isolated,” says Wrigley, now 73, who lives in Sydenham in Melbourne’s north-west. “I found retirement can be very boring if you let it. It’s a complete shift and you might want to travel, but you can only travel so much. Then you start thinking, ‘How long will I live for?’
“I thought I was ready to retire, but I hadn’t thought it through at all. Luckily, I was then offered a job for two days a week, so it was with some relief I agreed to go back to work. My husband and I also joined a Probus club [which offers social activities for the retired and semi-retired], and we’ve become involved in that which gets you out of the house.
“I’d recommend to others that they think it through carefully before they decide to jump and, if possible, gradually reduce their hours of work and then join groups like Probus or Rotary or the Lions Club and do some voluntary work. My husband retired before me [in his late 50s, two decades ago] and I remember, after three weeks, him saying, ‘What have I done?’ ”
Their son James Wrigley is, ironically, a financial adviser who specialises in retirement and has written a book on the subject, Retire Life Ready. He says the main difficulty with early retirement – apart from making sure you have enough funds – is that people may have 30 years of retirement ahead of them but have only been thinking in the short term about the pleasure of being able to sleep in, not answer to a boss and having a holiday.
“We find the most successfully retired people, in terms of happiness, are those who have things they can keep doing,” Wrigley says. “That might be going to Probus, like my parents, or looking after grandkids, volunteering with a church group, meeting other people, just doing stuff. You need somewhere to be or have someone relying on you – that’s important.”
Non-Indigenous Australians today enjoy one of the highest life expectancies in the world, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, with males born in 2021-23 expected to live to 81.1 years old and females to 85.1. First Nations people have an average life expectancy of 71.9 years for males and 75.6 for females.
Overall, life expectancy has been increasing steadily over the years, with the exception of the dip during the 2020-2023 COVID period. If someone takes early retirement in their 50s, they’re likely to have decades more to live. That could be more than 10,000 days, which is a hell of a long time to fill, advises retirement coach Jon Glass, especially if you don’t have good role models, with perhaps grandparents retiring and then dying straight afterwards, or parents not adjusting well. The biggest struggle he sees is the loss of identity after a lifetime of work. A high-level doctor client confessed to him his deepest fear: that it was his job that made him interesting and without it he’d be nothing.
“But I do find that a very important consideration is whether you want to stay mega-busy and continue doing 1000 things at once when you retire early, or whether you want a much calmer life,” says Glass. “It’s so important that people give that some thought and work out what kind of person they are.
“It’s also vital, if you have a partner with whom you’ll be sharing time and space, to make sure you do a lot of communicating and planning about what you’re going to do. You might have only seen each other in the evenings and at weekends, but now it’s 24/7. So you need to make sure you have a room to sometimes retreat to, or a door you can close. Men need to avoid what the Japanese call nure ochiba, or ‘wet fallen leaf syndrome’, where they follow their wives around everywhere like a leaf stuck to a shoe.”
Early retirement can be even tougher for single people, however. Jo White worked for the same funds management company for the best part of 30 years, planning to retire at 67. Then, when she was 62, the company was unexpectedly bought out, so she decided to retire early instead. For the first six months, she felt she was on holiday and loved her new life. Until she didn’t.
“I started to feel quite empty,” says White, now 63. “I thought, ‘Wow! I can’t do this for the next 20 years!’ I’m a single person and I think it impacted me more because I’m on my own. I’d become one of those people whose work co-mingled with my lifestyle and it was hard to untangle them.
“People told me I’d have to have a purpose and do something I loved. But I didn’t have a lot of hobbies, I didn’t do sport and every day seemed the same. Looking back, I should have thought a little bit more about my decision but I didn’t, and went from 100 miles per hour to zero the next day.”
White, who lives in Sydney’s beachside Coogee, then looked back on her life and recalled how she’d once loved food and cooking and, before entering the corporate world 40 years before, had become an apprentice chef and started a small catering business. She called a couple she once knew in hospitality, and they gave her casual work. Then she took up croquet and also volunteered to coordinate the catering for the club’s functions.
“I’m now back to doing something I love and it gives me a lot of satisfaction,” she says. “I do some paid work, I play croquet, which is a very strategic game and which has given me a whole new group of friends, and I do some voluntary work, giving back to the community. I needed to fill the void with another type of work and fulfil my passion. I took early retirement 15 months ago now and it’s been a journey, and a great deal of thought, to get to this point of being happy.”
Bestselling Australian author Bec Wilson has a new book out on retirement, Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Midlife, in addition to 2023’s How to Have an Epic Retirement, her Prime Time podcast and her Epic Retirement institute. Her Facebook community, The Epic Retirement Club, has 300,000 members in the UK alone.
“I think the main problem is that 50-year-olds need to know all about this stuff earlier, but they find the ‘retirement’ word repulsive,” says Wilson. “So no one talks about it until it happens and they’ve made all the mistakes, and suffer relevance deprivation.
“Instead, people need to understand longevity and use that to think about their goals in life, work out how they can retain purpose and fulfilment, age better and look after themselves more. They need to make the right choices early to have an exciting retirement rather than an ordinary one.
“They also need to have financial confidence and Australia is probably leading the world as the first generation to have super. Every other country is behind us. We’re in a position to broker a global conversation about finances and retirement.
“We shouldn’t think of retirement as a finish line but as the start of an elegant, slow easing into choosing our own adventure.”
Many people decide to retire early because they’re feeling overworked, stressed and simply can’t take it any more, says financial adviser Nicole Bell. But because of the stark contrast with their previous life, they often struggle with their mental health and loss of self-worth. Others may be forced into the decision by a toxic new boss, ageism, ill-health or redundancy.
“Whatever the reason, they still need to think about what they’re going to do with their time,” Bell says. “Too many people don’t think about what happens next and they might sit and watch TV for six months. They’ll have no sense of purpose and no reason to get out of bed in the mornings. It’s much more helpful, if possible, to take a more intentional transition to retirement, and plan for your life, not just your money.”
Former Macquarie Bank executive Henry Jennings knows what she means. Feeling absolutely burnt out by the pressure of doing deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars and running big teams, he negotiated a redundancy, planning it to be an early retirement, when he was just 38 years old.
It was a jolt. “You go from dealing with so many people and so much money, and being wined and dined and feted, and people telling you you’re wonderful, to being no one, just another dad at the school gates picking up his kids, from a VIP to a nobody,” says Jennings, who lives on Sydney’s northern beaches. “It was such a psychological change. Men in particular are very much defined by their work and it gives you status and definition and a place. To lose them all is a shock to the system.”
That, as well as boredom, soon set in. There weren’t even friends around to play golf with; they were all at work. Jennings toyed with an acting career, going to drama school and dabbling in acting, producing and directing, then finally returning to the financial sector, advising clients on stocks and working as a market strategist and analyst.
Now 63, he’s planning his second retirement. “I’ve been looking around at some of the role models for happy retirement, and that doesn’t include drinking tea in caravan parks,” he says. “I think this time, I won’t go cold turkey. I’ll spend five more years stepping back and doing fewer days … That should work this time.”
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