Clark said neither he nor his wife, who also worked in finance and has retrained as a psychotherapist, have any plans to retire. \u201cI will work until I drop,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He keeps himself fit by running and organises events to encourage others to stay active. \u201cI have no regrets. Towards the end of my career I was starting to feel very old \u2014 I was the oldest person in the office and was doing the things I said I\u2019d never do and holding on to a job I wasn\u2019t growing with. I was feeling old and insignificant. Ten years later I feel ten years younger.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"George](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/e3131282-c33a-45f7-86cd-058064f16d5f.jpg\")
George Jerjian realised that he was \u201cdrifting into oblivion\u201d in retirement<\/p>\n
George Jerjian, 71, from London, retired at 52 after he was diagnosed with a terminal bone tumour and given six months to live. You can usually withdraw money from a private pension before the age of 55 if you have been given a terminal diagnosis. You don\u2019t have to repay the money if you survive, as long as the medical opinion was given in good faith.<\/p>\n
Jerjian said: \u201cMy oncologist said to me that in 98 per cent of cases, a bone tumour is a secondary cancer, which means it has spread throughout your body. Thankfully I belong to the 2 per cent club.\u201d<\/p>\n
He defied the odds and was given the all clear but \u201ca restlessness came over me\u201d, he said. \u201cEverything was falling apart in my life \u2014 relationships, friendships, nothing was working. And I had to do something drastic.\u201d He went on a 30-day silent retreat in north Wales and realised that he was \u201cdrifting into oblivion\u201d.\u00a0Now he runs courses encouraging others to unretire. \u201cYou just have to change your mindset,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
![\"Black](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5b3ddaec-e43a-40cf-a95a-865a047baa18.jpg\")
Sophie Hughes went back to work as a lawyer<\/p>\n
A share bonus led the divorce lawyer Sophie Hughes to retire from her law practice at 59 but she returned to work less than a year later. \u201cI have a lot of interests but I didn\u2019t really have a plan and when I retired, I felt like I still had something professional to give,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Hughes works as a senior lawyer for Knights, a law firm in Cardiff, and said she has been \u201cfreed up from all the things that were grinding me down\u201d, such as the admin and HR side of the job, and can just focus on helping her clients.<\/p>\n
Lucy Standing, the founder of Brave Starts, a nonprofit forum that offers later-life careers advice, said: \u201cI can\u2019t think of one person who has come to me saying, \u2018I want to get another job and work hell-for-leather for five days a week, nine to five.\u2019 Most say they want to carry on working, and need to carry on working, but are in a place where they want to do it on their own terms.\u201d<\/p>\n
What it means for your pension<\/p>\n
If you are thinking of heading back to work after retirement, there are financial implications to consider.<\/p>\n
If you get full new state pension this could take up your entire tax-free annual income allowance of \u00a312,570. Anything you earn on top of that could be taxable.\u00a0However, those working past state pension age no longer have to pay national insurance contributions, which does give your pay packet a boost. You can opt to pause your state pension and get a higher amount later on but you can only do this once. If you are not yet getting the state pension you can defer taking it at all<\/a>. For every year you defer you get an extra 5.8 per cent but you run the risk of not living long enough to get back the money you missed out on by deferring.<\/p>\n Mike Ambery from Standard Life said: \u201cThe extra effort of additional hours may not be worth it if it comes with a higher tax bill. And for those who are choosing to work well beyond state pension age, there\u2019s an added consideration that tax relief stops being applied to pension contributions when you hit 75.\u201d<\/p>\n Once you have started taking money from a pension, you are limited in the amount you can save into it tax-free. If you have taken anything beyond the initial tax-free lump sum, you will trigger the money purchase annual allowance, which means you can only benefit from tax relief on pension contributions of up to \u00a310,000 a year.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile this is still a decent sum, if your main goal of returning to work is to top up your pension, you could hit this sum quickly,\u201d Ambery said. Returning to work may trigger auto-enrolment into a workplace scheme if you are under state pension age but you can opt out of this. <\/p>\n Ambery said: \u201cThere are lots of handy calculators out there which will show you how long your money might last. The bad news is that pensions will be subject to inheritance tax from next April so leaving your pension pot untouched could be a risky strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Glyn Clark has a pension pot of more than a million pounds after a 25-year career in finance.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[84,4176,4174,4175,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-540374","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-finance","10":"tag-personal-finance","11":"tag-personalfinance","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}