Further Thoughts of Retirement…
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
from Little Gidding, Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot.
The start of teaching for 2026/7 is approaching at an alarming rate. new and continuing students are registering and today we had a staff meeting in the Department of Physics about arrangements for the new term. This all made me think again about retirement.
About three years, while I was in Barcelona on sabbatical , I posted an item about looking forward to retirement. Here is an excerpt from that piece:
The fact of the matter is, though, that I can’t afford to retire yet. I have a mortgage to pay and I’ve only had five full years of pensionable service in the Irish system, so won’t get much of a pension. I have the frozen residue of my UK pension, of course, but that is subject to an actuarial reduction if I take the benefit before I’m 65, which is also the standard retirement age for academic staff in Ireland. I can’t be made to retire here until I’m 70, in fact, but I think I’ll be well beyond my best-before date by then and am not keen to overstay my welcome.
So it looks like I’ll have to stay until I’m 65 at the earliest. In fact I won’t be able to collect the State Pension (SPC) until I’m 66, so I’ll probably have to stay until then. That means that when I get back from sabbatical I will have four or five years left until I can retire.
Since I posted this I made a firm decision that I will retire as soon as I’m able, which should be in June 2028. Having sold my old house in Cardiff some time ago, I have paid off my Maynooth mortgage which makes the financial situation much simpler. I am now quite confident that I can afford to retire before I’m 66.
I know many academics don’t like the idea of retiring. I suppose that’s because they’re afraid they won’t know what to do with their time. I’ve never felt like that. I’ve always had plenty of outside interests, but now there’s another factor. As I alluded to in an earlier post, and contrary to all my expectations of three years ago, there is another person involved. That person, whose name I won’t reveal, graduated this summer from an unnamed university, and is just about to embark on a two-year Masters degree (in a subject not to be disclosed) in a location I won’t tell you about. He will be finishing that course in the summer 2028.
For the next two years things for us will be pretty much as they are now: not living together, but spending as much time in each other’s company as possible at weekends and holidays. That arrangement suits us both very well in the current circumstances but we have already started discussing plans beyond the two-year horizon. Some of these are not at all serious, but amusing to think about. Others would be fantastic if they turned out to be possible. We have the best part of two years to decide what to do. In any event, I find it exciting to be able to think seriously of retirement as a beginning as well as an end.
September 14, 2026 at 8:05 pm
I thought most academics loved the idea of retiring nowadays, because they could at last get on with their research shorn of the useless admin.
September 14, 2026 at 9:10 pm
I love your potential retirement plans, good for you Pete!
September 14, 2026 at 10:49 pm
I think that for many academics their sense of their own identity is so strongly tied up with their profession that they feel they won’t know who or what they are when they’re no longer a professor. I don’t think that I’ll feel that way. I still enjoy my job most days, and I think I’m still reasonably good at it. When one or both of those things stop being true, I hope I’ll have the good sense to quit.
I have asked several people I’m close to to be brutally honest and tell me if the latter has stopped being true. I know of cases where nobody was willing to tell a professor that, or the professor wasn’t willing to hear it, and I don’t want to be that person. They say it hasn’t happened to me yet. Of course, they might just be avoiding an awkward conversation, but I really don’t think so. (But then, maybe I wouldn’t think so! That’s the whole point of having other people tell me.)
In the US, it’s much easier to retire at 65 or later, because of the absurd way we handle health insurance. It turns out that there are ways to deal with that if one retires earlier, but I’m pretty sure I’ll want to continue that long (i.e., six more years).
September 14, 2026 at 10:50 pm
Much more importantly, I hope you and your partner work things out so you can be together!
September 15, 2026 at 9:41 am
Almost two years into retirement, I can highly recommend it as another beginning, not an end.
Delighted to hear of your liaison not so dangereuse!
Miss Lemon
September 15, 2026 at 9:51 am
Good luck for the future retirement! Do you think you might try and get an honorary position at a university near where you end up living, and carry on doing some research? The great thing about working in retirement (as I do) is that you do what you want, rather than what others want or tell you to do. You also escape from the administrative stuff which now seems to dominate academics’ lives. If you end up in the UK, there are still grant schemes to which you can apply if retired to support your work. The Leverhulme Trust has a special scheme to allow academics to finish a piece of work after rtirement.
September 15, 2026 at 12:47 pm
I have a few things I’d like to do research-wise after retirement, as well as many non-research things. Having some sort of connection with a university would be useful, of course, but it needn’t be near why I’m living because all I would need is an institutional affiliation and (online) library access.
September 16, 2026 at 7:03 pm
Yes, I saw recently that a contemporary of mine, class of ’92, and somebody you did a paper with way back in Queen Mary times, publish work from a Romanian Institution and pretty sure he hadn’t moved there.
September 16, 2026 at 7:10 pm
I am hoping to have a new life in retirement with a special someone too, sometime fairly soon. Hope it works out well for you.