[lesuorac]

When you retire is a personal decision (and also a financial one but I think for most people on this forum it's mostly a personal one).

That said, if somebody is say counting the days until 55 so that they can retire then it's likely they also wanted to retire pre-55. If the money is "stuck" in a 401k and so they are unwilling to retired beforehand then it probably would've been better for them to have stuck some portion of their 401k contributions into a taxable brokerage account and then retired pre-55.

But in this specific example, the guy I responded to was self-employed I'm kinda guessing their "hobby" is their job and so they kept working despite not needing to.