Anyone about to ride (or has ridden) The Great Resignation Wave?

[QuarterMillionMan]

Shrm article, How to Ride the Great Resignation Wave (shrm.org)

I'm 55 with 18 years in one public sector hoping to go another 7 years but if forced (ie, health reasons, toxic work place, etc) I would ride the wave albeit I would take an enormous pay cut and have to pay for Biden care until I can get Medicare. Anyone contemplating riding the wave of resignation or has already jumped on the wave and how much of a pay cut did you have to take?

[Thrif-t]

I'm contemplating. I'm 55 too

I'm still working at home and have no desire to go back. Everyone went back in June, but because my DD23 is a covid nurse and lives with us, they told me to stay home until they tell me to come back. I don't want to go back. Our cities highway system is being redone and it's a freaking mess. I just don't want to deal with that commute and traffic.

But I don't know? I have a pretty sweet gig and DH will probably retire in 3 to 4 years, so part of me thinks I should just suck it up till I'm ready to hang up my cleats for good. We'll see, I keep going back and forth. Until they call me back in the office, I'm riding it out.

[disneysteve]

I'm dipping my toes into the wave with my drop to part time status in 10 days. I'll see how that goes, how I like it, how our finances look, and then decide when to call it quits entirely. About 3 million more people have retired since COVID began than would otherwise have been expected. I also saw an article today that 1 in 5 healthcare workers has left the field since the pandemic started so there's definitely a tidal wave of people getting out. It's going to take many years for the healthcare system to recover from the ongoing impact of COVID.

[bjl584]

I'm still at it. I'm in manufacturing and warehousing, so I never stopped reporting to work all throughout the pandemic.
I have thought about a career change, but I'm up in the air as to what that would look like

[ua_guy]

The article accurately predicted a wave of resignations. It was written in the summer of 2021 and September/October this year did see record workplace departures after a rising wave this summer.

I left a situation at work this summer and I couldn't be happier. And I haven't found a new role yet, either, and that's by choice. After all we've gone through personally during the pandemic, I'm just fine taking a big ol' breath of fresh air.

[james.hendrickson]

Well, if you leave your job, be sure you have enough money to cover 6 months of expenses. If anything, the last two years have shown that social change is rapid, and...frankly more unpredictable than I'm comfortable with.

[srblanco7]

Contemplate joining the Great Resignation on (at least) a weekly basis. Working is overrated . Still targeting transition to regular part-time next year and then an exit in Jan 2023 to allow for Rule of 55 access to my 401k. Will use income next year to continue to fill our cash bucket and address a few needed household maintenance items (e.g., new roof).

[QuarterMillionMan]

You can see my calculated pension in government service if I were to retire today at 55 yrs old with 18 yrs of service would be 26% of my salary, peanuts and not enough to survive, albeit I do have other retirement & taxable accounts that I could tap into. The longer I go the higher the percentage so it's to my advantage to keep going as long as possible.

[amarowsky]

I road it last year. Resigned 1/24/2020 (like a month before the apocalypse).

Landed happily on my feet now. My investment rentals, + a contractor photography job, and just under 1year into a reroll career as a realtor (helps out w/ my investment rentals too). Quite happy, although I may even be busier than I was as a Corporate sales guy(I was working for an Japanese automotive supplier as an account manager).

Overall I'm happy w/ my move. But had I waited 1 month, I would have had the luxury of working from home full time for the next year to get a "feel for how that would have been". The resignation wave hit my old automotive sales job exceptionally hard, they have had a significant amount of turnover in the nearly 2 years i've been gone now.

Clearly it didn't take a pandemic for me to realize, that for my life, sitting in a cube for 50+ hours a week wasn't really an ideal environment for my personality. Thankfully I learned a lot from there and didn't burn any bridges. Just happy to be working for myself as a contractor (realtor doesn't really count as employed, in my book. it's just "work") after my 4+ year run in an office, I don't think the "typical corporate" office is a good fit for me.

I really hope others were able to find out "what didn't work for them" through this resignation wave. And also, there is no harm (or shame) in going back to an old job/industry, after venturing out to try something new.

[LivingAlmostLarge]

Funny my DH went the opposite way. He could be sitting in a super cushy WFH job permanently and yet he chose to go back to the office.

[GoodLiving]

During the great pause, my spouse and I had lots of discussions. I'm just 52 but our last meeting with the FP indicated that I can pull the plug in 3-5 years. That seems so soon and I think I'll end up on a phased retirement path around age 56-57 or so working .4 for the 6 years until I quit for sure.

[scfr]

Anyone else been wondering about the lagging effect of this? Specifically, about the impact of fewer workers paying in to Social Security? I guess time will tell. In the meantime, for me it seems prudent to decrease reliance on Social Security benefits when doing retirement planning..

[kork13]

Anyone else been wondering about the lagging effect of this? Specifically, about the impact of fewer workers paying in to Social Security? I guess time will tell. In the meantime, for me it seems prudent to decrease reliance on Social Security benefits when doing retirement planning..

I'd say it's always prudent to reduce reliance on Social Security. While it's unlikely that the program will be eliminated or die off in its entirety, it will have to see some variety of changes over the next decade or two in order to remain viable. Some of those options include reduced payments, delayed eligibility, increased SS taxes, .... just to name a few. It's there to keep retirees out of abject poverty but it's not going to be life-changing by any stretch, and more than ever it requires support from personal savings.

[scfr]

I'd say it's always prudent to reduce reliance on Social Security. While it's unlikely that the program will be eliminated or die off in its entirety, it will have to see some variety of changes over the next decade or two in order to remain viable. Some of those options include reduced payments, delayed eligibility, increased SS taxes, .... just to name a few. It's there to keep retirees out of abject poverty but it's not going to be life-changing by any stretch, and more than ever it requires support from personal savings.

Absolutely! "Reliance" may not have been the best word. Our plan had been to cover basic, bare-bones expenses from our personal savings/investments, with SS covering any "extras." But now I wonder if it's more prudent to have enough in personal funds to cover basic, bare-bones expenses + a frugal-minded amount of extras, with SS covering anything beyond that. The younger I was, the less I would count on SS covering anything.

[kork13]

The younger I was, the less I would count on SS covering anything.

That probably colors my opinion as well -- I'm only 35, so 30+ years from taking whatever SS looks like at that point in time. I expect there to be something, but I don't trust that it will make a meaningful difference in our finances. I plan to fully fund our own retirement (though in fairness, we do also plan for military retirement pensions for DW & I).