[solresol]

Started a Masters in Research at age 48. Exerted almost no effort and have ended up with 3 publishable papers and two other papers in progress. Ticked off my bucket list to get an Erdos number (already had a Bacon and Metallica number). Looking around for a PhD program next year.

I had tried to do a PhD when I was younger, but financially it was too hard. Now I'm senior enough that I can live off consulting gigs that aren't full time.

Your partner's support is the most important. Second most important is to have something that you want to research --- if you have spent most of your career doing software development, research that, because you already have some hypotheses about practices that work and don't work. In my case I had already worked out most of what I wanted to write about long before I started.