Age gap retirement

My ex husband was 17 years older than me and when we divorced he was 66. I continued to work full time and it was decided that while he was fit enough he would continue to work full time too, it seemed unnecessary for him to give up.

Not age gap, but redundancy/ forced into early retirement for my DH. He has been home since around age 50, I am still working at 59.

It works out really well for us. He is the best house-husband, doing yard work, cleaning and cooking. I still enjoy my job and am well compensated so not ready to retire yet. I come home to clean house and dinner prepared, glass of cider at hand.

I really do think it depends on personalities. I hope he has plans or a schedule if you are to continue working. The only issue is if he had hoped to travel, then perhaps you can arrange longer vacation time or make other arrangements. My DH has a spring fishing trip and fall hunting trip which I happily wave as he leaves to enjoy a bit of time on my own.

Not exactly the same but Mr. B had to take medical retirement 17 years before I was due to retire. I was the main wage earner anyway. He started doing voluntary work and loves it. Now I’m retired he does one day a week volunteering so we can do things together,

I have experienced that situation. My husband retired early at fifty from his local government job, with a pretty good pension, while I continued teaching for another fourteen years, until ill health forced me to retire.

The agreement was that he took over the running of the house, including cooking. The cooking part was soon dropped, when the children begged me to go back to doing the cooking! I agreed as his cooking was pretty awful and I was a fairly skilled cook.
At this time, I was also studying for another degree and admit to initially feeling somewhat resentful, when he was out golfing, while I was killing myself at the chalk face and spending weekends writing essays.

However, things settled down and it worked well. My husband quickly became bored, so took on some consultancy work in both the public and private sectors and studied part time at university as well. In the end we learned to compromise.
He found the mental stimulation, he was missing and the consultancy fees paid for luxuries, we otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford.

Its best to set the ground rules from the start. The stress of my husband's job, was taking a toll on his health and taking early retirement was a very wise move indeed.

Forward planning and communication is the key! I hope it works out for you both.

We weren’t married at the time but DH took early retirement due to redundancy at 55 and it really annoyed me having to get up for work at 7 leaving him lying in bed! I did assume that he would get another job of some kind, or do voluntary work but he never did. Thankfully we’re both retired now but it did bother me that he was happy to do nothing.

I am another pushed by redundancy into early retirement in my early 50s. DH, the same age, and now in is late 70s has never really stopped working. He retired from employment and took his company pension at 60. He was retired for a year, but was then asked to return to a previous employer as a self-employed project manager. He did two major projects, then retired again around 65, for all of two or three months before working with a friend as consultant engineers, and since then has averaged one weeks work a month. The figure varies from year to year.

I tried to get back to work without success so then started to work for a charity as a volunteer. This did lead to six months employment to cover the maternity leave of my manager. My main job became being Family CEO, DH's work always required a lot of travelling at short notice for indefinite periods. So I was in charge of everything.

If your partner is several years older or younger than you are, this is something that you will need to think about and discuss before it happens.

Thanks for experiences. My husband was made redundant a few years ago and took 12 weeks out over a summer. He did lots around the house and also caught up with his colleagues in the same situation. I enjoyed him being at home then.

I think my concern is that when it is permanent the novelty will pass and he will have less of a focus. In turn he will want more of my time, which is great up to a point, but I enjoy work and have my own interests.

I ask him how envisages spending his time but he can only focus on not having to work and says he will do diy. He isn't lazy so I know he will do more of the housework than he already does. I have been working from home a little during the pandemic and it has taken a while to get him to appreciate that I am working and not available for anything else.

Why not consider overpaying your mortgage so at least that is over with by the time your husband retires. You could then reduce your hours at the time of his retirement.

It's surprising how overpaying reduces the life of a mortgage.

From what I read on here, so many retired men like to sit around and do nothing!

Thanks in terms of the mortgage I could only afford to pay it off before he retires if I stopped contributing to a pension and financially it makes more sense to keep the pension contributions going.

If I can get to just three years left on the mortgage we would have the option to downsize mortgage free and stay local, but ideally I would like to move to a cheaper area altogether when I retire rather than have the cost of two moves.

Mine used to cook the tea and do the washing after he retired, 5 years before me. I loved it, coming home to a warm cosy house and the smell of cooking. Perfect!

@nanna8 - This is my hope too!

My husband retired earlier than expected due to ill health (although he did some work from home) but he took over all the supermarket shopping and cooked dinner every evening.

My DH retired from teaching 7 years ago age 58.He was given a large bonus from the council as they wanted rid of older teachers so many applied for this. After the summer holidays they realised too late that there were not enough teachers left and had to get supply in! Anyway he made the evening meals for me as I finished work at 5.30 and did a lot of housework, gardening etc. He did watch TV in the mornings though but helped DD1 with our toddler DGS1 when she had to spend a lot of her 2nd pregnancy resting after a cervical suture had to be inserted. He did some supply work in private education to see what it was like after working in the state system all his working life. I did feel my retirement was underplayed 3 years ago and I had to fit in with what he did and not have my own time to settle into retirement.