By Steve Garmhausen

Thousands of Americans retire every day, hanging it up to enjoy leisure, travel, and maybe some volunteering. Many are surprised to find themselves back at work: In a recent six-month period, 7% of retirees resumed working, according to an AARP survey. In some cases they need the money. In others their old company gives them a generous deal to consult on a project. And sometimes they just find retirement boring. For this week's Barron's Advisor Big Q, we asked financial advisors how they support these "unretires," including helping them understand whether they really need to go back to work in the first place.

Travis Taylor, financial advisor, Wells Fargo Advisors: Waking up to go to work when it's not required to make ends meet is something like the pinnacle of success. I've got a client who picked up a school bus route after he retired as a healthcare executive. I've got an unretired engineer who decided to teach math to elementary school students. And I've got an attorney who got involved with small business and real estate after retirement. From a practical standpoint there are three main considerations for people like these.

From a financial planning perspective, I think about Social Security taxes and Medicare premiums. Social Security considers a person retired as soon as they start sending them benefit checks. If you start back to work before full retirement age, which is 67 for anybody born after or during or after 1960, and you're already receiving your checks, there are a couple of income thresholds above which they will start to reduce your benefit for that given year. That's important for folks to understand before they unretire.

The second consideration is taxes. It's important to know if your newfound job will land you in a higher tax bracket. And a lot of times folks forget that especially at this age, they may stand to inherit a large IRA. That may require them to take required minimum distributions for 10 years to empty those accounts out -- creating income which may bump them into a tax bracket they're not comfortable with.

Third, Medicare premiums are higher for people who make more money. Your Medicare premiums are based on your income from two years prior. So in 2026 they'll look at your income from 2024, and if you go above certain thresholds, your Medicare Part B and Part D could go up. It's a mistake you may not realize for two years, so I make sure folks understand how their Medicare premiums could change as a result of additional income.

Amy Braun-Bostich, founder, CEO, and private wealth advisor, Braun-Bostich & Associates: There are different groups of unretirees. One is hobbyists or people looking for social exposure, and they don't have that much in earnings coming in. Most of them will need to file a Schedule C [required for many freelancers and "gig workers"], so we walk through that and the deductions they may be able to use against their income. Most of them can control the time they spend working, so no work-life balance coaching is necessary.

The second group are the consultants, who might be engineers who get pulled back in because of their expertise. They might earn anywhere from $30,000 to $300,000 a year, so it really does impact taxes. We look at things like Roth conversions, Medicare impact, and Social Security timing. Many of these clients have donor-advised funds, and a few have foundations. So we look at charitable planning and then have a conversation about work-life balance.

The third category is those with financial need. Most of these people were displaced workers who were forced into retirement early. We use their financial plan to show them the trade-offs between expenses and the earnings they could bring in. We spend a lot of time coaching around cash flow and which expenses could be cut or tightened. We also look at Social Security timing: Unlike the consultants, we may have them collect Social Security earlier, depending on their needs and earning potential.

Nell Cordick, financial advisor, Bogart Wealth: Often the reason people unretire is that making the transition to retirement is very hard, especially for individuals who have been extremely focused on their work. They are still looking for a purpose, a reason to feel productive, a way to provide value. It comes down to the fact that work still defines them. I've also found that when some people end their career they are afraid of immediately taking their assets, especially if they're in their mid-50s. That's a very hard transition for people until they experience it. So they take part-time employment to supplement their income. We use financial planning projections to show them what their spend will be; we'll show them a worst-case example. We also start doing a small amount of distributions so they can understand what it feels like to have a paycheck from their assets versus a paycheck from a company. In the fourth quarter of every year, we talk about what their cash flow looks like for the coming year. There may be travel expenses coming up, gifts they want to give their kids, home improvements, medical expenses. Once people can visualize all of that being taken care of, it makes it much easier for them to move forward. So financial planning and cash flow planning are the keys.

Eric Kirste, wealth manager at Savvy Advisors: What our clients are going to do day to day in retirement is something we dig into quite a bit before they retire. We want to help them understand how they envision retirement. What are they going to be doing? Is it travel, family? Do they want to volunteer, start a business, work somewhere else? What source of fulfillment is going to get me going every day?

We ask unretiring clients a lot of the same sorts of questions as those before they retired. Unretiring is probably going to have a monetary impact, so we talk about cash flow. About potentially going back to a retirement plan -- what does that look like? Probably more importantly, we talk about lifestyle and behavioral issues and then dig into what's causing them to unretire. Is it boredom? Is it a lack of purpose? Is it financial stress? We want to understand the root cause. When you dig into the underlying causes, you might be able to dispel some myths. For example, an adult child of a client was going through extreme financial hardship. This is a case where maybe the client felt a little embarrassed and initially didn't want to have a conversation. But in discussions with them, we ultimately found out they could give some gifts without materially hurting their retirement as long as they made some adjustments. So getting at those underlying reasons can really help with next steps.

Write to advisor.editors@barrons.com

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March 11, 2026 16:10 ET (20:10 GMT)

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