She's 15 years younger, he's about to retire. Should she ditch her job to be with him?

Tuesday, 30 December 2025

Retirement questions Answered: from time to time, we will pick a question sent in by a reader and offer a response from contributor Gill South. You can read more here and submit questions below.

The age gap

Some fantastic questions from those approaching retirement have already come in, offering insight to the challenges facing those in their 50s and 60s.

One Stuff reader writes: My partner is 15 years older than me and has just retired at 65. I work full-time but want to spend time with him travelling and volunteering now while he's healthy. I worry that by the time I turn 65, he'll be slowing down. We have enough savings so I can just about stop work now, but I worry about the pace of societal change and whether the financial assumptions I am using will be out of date and that I will run out of money too early. How do others in a similar situation handle the different times of life? What are the biggest risks and ways I can protect our financial security so we can maximise our time together?

The cost of leaving your job

Someone close to me – I’ll call her Carol* – has done this very thing and I asked her about her experience, if she had any regrets about retiring early. She was in her early 50s, he was in his mid 60s.

Carol had a big finance job and would have liked to have gone part-time rather than retiring altogether but this wasn’t an option open to her from her employer.

At the same time, she did not like the idea of slaving away full-time so her beloved husband could live the life of Riley on her income and his pension. Also, she is very fond of him and didn’t want to miss out on the fun- they met in her 40s, his 50s.

The community has certainly benefited from my friend’s skills; she has been treasurer for a variety of local groups during her long retirement, and she and her partner have indeed enjoyed a rich life together.

As someone who has written a lot about women’s careers, I hate to see anyone stopping work early if they are enjoying what they’re doing and making a great contribution.

I ran our reader’s question past business and life strategist Kate Ross, who works with women at various stages of their careers.

In her opinion, 50 is young, and our reader could have another 40 years to live to retire, travel and weed the garden, as she puts it.

Her advice is to have an open discussion with her employer and negotiate taking four to eight weeks a year unpaid leave to go on trips, or to work remotely so she could check in during overseas trips.

“Once you leave at this age and stage you may not always find it easy to get back in if you have made the wrong choice,” she warns. And staying working keeps you young.

Understanding the finances

I went to financial adviser, Mark Patton from Stuart Carlyon, for his thoughts on our reader’s situation and how she should weigh up her decision from a financial perspective.

Before making the decision to retire early, think about the trade-offs, suggests Patton. Think about your emotional, personal ambitions and goals, and then it’s about doing projections and adjusting them according to different scenarios.

With the projections, he is looking 30 years into the future, Patton says. “You build up a picture, and it shows what happens if you pull this lever or that lever.

It’s about understanding the difference of various options, and having more information so you can make choices, he says.

“We’ll look at a long-term projection of what the expected return is, and then we’ll deliberately look at some downside scenarios, what if the returns aren’t as good as expected,” he explains.

“We’ll try and make sure that the funds will last to one’s life expectancy, even in that downside scenario, so you’ve got this buffer zone,” he says.

Mark will often come across a client’s situation where the base case of expected returns only just gets there or doesn’t quite get there. Then there are three levers you can choose from or do a combination of, he says.

One is to increase your income, which often means working for longer. The second is to trim expenditures so that it’s a little bit less each year, and the third is to have a capital inflow – which might mean downsizing your house, or an inheritance.

Increasing your income, you can only do so much, because you can’t work until you’re 90 (just watch me, Mark!), he says.

Spending less is the hardest, but you could project to spend less after 85, for instance, he suggests.

Releasing capital isn’t something you can do a lot of, he explains. You can’t keep downsizing your house, though people will often move to a smaller home and then to a retirement home as they age.

After assessing investment risk, Mark says the two other risks beyond our reader’s control are longevity, living longer than expected, and changes in legislation, for instance in NZ Super and Capital Gains Tax.

We hope that helps, dear reader, keep those questions coming.

*Disclaimer: The information in this article is of a general nature and is not intended to be personalised financial advice. The names of the individuals in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.

If you have a question you’d like answered, drop it in the document below. The more detail you provide (please don’t include personal banking information), the more likely it is that we’ll look into answering it.

Gill South is a freelance business writer who has authored a book on personal finance and written for many major publications in New Zealand.