private pension<\/a> but quickly came to the conclusion that he did not want to \u201close his brain\u201d.<\/p>\nSo a year on, he took the decision to do what he calls \u201cunretire\u201d and invested in a travel franchise. <\/p>\n
After a tough initial year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, he says his travel consultancy, Not Just Travel, has made \u00a31.6m in the past three or four years, and that he now has no timeline for his second retirement.<\/p>\n
The 64-year-old says: \u201cI\u2019m in this for the long run as I really enjoy it. I don\u2019t have that pressure that I had with my corporate career in that I can be my own boss.<\/p>\n
\u201cPersonally, I think if you can keep your brain working while providing people with things they enjoy that\u2019s very rewarding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bob, who lives in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, says he probably works more than 40 hours a week most weeks, but that he can work around doing other things, like being a \u201cdad taxi\u201d for his children, who are in their late teens and early twenties.<\/p>\n
Bob is not alone. <\/p>\n
Polling from Standard Life shows that 16 per cent of those who had retired have either already returned to work or are considering it amid ongoing financial pressures. Another 19 per cent said they had not appreciated how long retirement would last.<\/p>\n
More than two million people aged above state pension age were still working in the 2024-25 tax year, according to HMRC.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/SEI_295225031-e1777555530281.jpg\")
Glyn Clark \u2018unretired\u2019 after nearly 40 years of working in the financial services industry (Photo: Nichole Rees)<\/p>\n
Glyn Clark is another person who began working again after initially taking early retirement.<\/p>\n
At 57, after a near 40-year career in financial services, including a stint at Goldman Sachs, Glyn retired in 2018 after he was made redundant from his role at a hedge fund.<\/p>\n
\u201cI quickly realised I didn\u2019t know what to do with myself and wasn\u2019t ready to retire,\u201d says Glyn, who lives in north London.<\/p>\n
\u201cI initially looked at getting back into financial services but there wasn\u2019t much going at my age and seniority. I became more and more desperate looking for work and considered becoming a postman,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n
Eventually, he decided to invest his savings into opening a home care business called Radfield Home Care Camden, Islington & Haringey, of which is he now the director. <\/p>\n
The firm provides home and live-in care and supports people with a variety of specialist medical conditions such as dementia, Parkinson\u2019s disease, stroke, cancer and respiratory failure. <\/p>\n
It involved putting around \u00a3120,000 of his own money into the business to get it going, but he now says the work suits him \u201cdown to the ground\u201d.<\/p>\n
He says he probably now works more than 60 hours per week, but has flexibility in that he can now work from home.<\/p>\n
The 65-year-old says he has no plans to give up work in the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not going to retire, if anything I want to do more. There\u2019s a decline in healthy life expectancy at the moment and I think a lot of it is down to people slowing down and not having a purpose,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome people live to 80 or 90 but they\u2019re not necessarily more healthy as a result of retiring,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
What to look out for financially if you unretire<\/p>\n
If you start working again after taking your pension, there are financial pitfalls you need to look out for. <\/p>\n
Beware of the money purchase annual allowance. Usually, people can put \u00a360,000 into their pension tax-free every year, but once you start accessing a defined contribution (DC) pension flexibly, this changes. Your allowance is restricted to \u00a310,000 a year. \u201cThis could have a real impact on you if you were returning to work with the intention of rebuilding your pension,\u201d explains Helen Morrissey, head of retirement analysis at Hargreaves Lansdown.<\/p>\n
The extra income could push you up a tax bracket. If you are taking pension income and income from work, you will be taxed on both incomes. So if for example, you are taking a \u00a320,000-a-year pension, and go into work earning \u00a335,000, you will face a marginal tax rate of 40 per cent, because your income takes you above the \u00a350,270 higher rate tax threshold. \u201cIt may make sense to reduce or pause pension withdrawals where possible,\u201d says Eamonn Prendergast of Palantir Financial Planning.<\/p>\n
Could you defer your state pension? If you return to work beyond your state pension age, you may find that you don\u2019t need to access your state pension. \u201cYou don\u2019t receive the state pension automatically when you reach state pension age, you need to claim it. For every nine weeks you defer you will get 1 per cent added to your weekly state pension amount. This means deferring for a year could give you a 5.8 per cent boost to your state pension when you do come to claim it which can be very useful,\u201d says Morrissey. This can be a way to limit tax issues outlined above, but it\u2019s always worth considering whether it\u2019s right in your individual circumstance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Soon after Bob Grace retired from his job as a regional director at Jaguar Landrover in 2018, he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":641428,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[45,49,48,2443,133,6107,131,132,1705,5368],"class_list":["post-641427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-employment","tag-finance","tag-pensions","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-retirement","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=641427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641427\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/641428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=641427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=641427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=641427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}