I suppose it’s in how you word it. I’ve given up on trying to get a job because there is no point in trying. I can’t afford to pay my rent, but I guess you could call that early retirement.
If you can stomach it, the seafood canning and fishing industry in Alaska will usually (IDK what the situation is this year) hire anyone off the street, work them 16 hours a day for several months, and give them "free housing." You'll get dumped back in Seattle in several months with at least $10k in your pocket.
Edit: genuinely perplexed on the response. This saved my ass one winter when I had nothing for rent.
If you are working 16 hours a day, you won't even go to your "free housing", you will sleep next to your workplace on a mat and then try and finish toilet/bath in office restroom in 1hour, so you can at-least get some restful hours of sleep before the next day.
A question that roughly 500,000 people in America find themselves asking. So far, the answer seems to be “in a pup tent in the woods behind Walmart”, because there’s not a ton of great options otherwise.
> However, in June the biggest plunge came from what is defined as “prime age” workers, or those between the ages of 25 and 54. That rate fell 0.6 percentage point to 83.3%, its lowest since December 2023.
It's great how two sources can tell a completely different story about the same numbers.
The first FRED link shows how noisy that subgroup is. It’s bounced around with 83-84% during that time. It was 83.8% in March and 83.5% through much of 2024.
An aging population means 25-54 represent less workers and people "retiring" from the labor force before social security age is likely to be deeply negative for their finances into old age and not just a decision from the relative luxury of being able to select jobs with quick vesting pensions like in past decades.
If pension ages were going down over the years and the average worker were well vested by 55 then in that reality all would be fine.
I think you are grossly overestimating the number of people >55 years old who free willingly retire early because of having enough new worth. Already millenials' CVs are written off in recruitment pipelines.
> millenials' CVs are written off in recruitment pipelines
I think you've got something wrong here, "millennials" refers to people currently between 30 and 45 and are surely the least likely to be discriminated based on either age or inexperience.
Or they hit that sweet spot of being old enough to have commitments so they can't be a fresh grad slave and young enough to not have benefitted when the getting was good and easy and so they are discriminated against.
Prime age is meant to filter college kids and retirees which makes sense but it is likely hiding the minor crisis in hiring for college grads. But I agree it's not disastrous just a yellow flag. The 20 year bull market has minted a lot of millionaires amongst the upper middle class and a lot of them are retiring early.
There's nothing wrong with retiring a few years early if you're comfortable doing so. I sorta did. On the other hand, I didn't really want to hang around too long after either.
55+ crushing it on the asset inflation mania they got at ~zero interest, the youngins left holding the bag of the inflationary cost renting out houses their seniors got negative real interest mortgages for.
Not all of them, some of them have just been pushed out of the workforce unwillingly due to ageism while still financially insecure.
I'm all about people being angry with the current situation and pushing for class war, but blanket assumptions about any demographic, including those of a certain age, is not helpful.
It's likely not even people retiring early, just demographics shifting up the ages. The youngest baby boomers are 61. The percentage of Americans over the age of 60 increased from 22.8% in 2020 to 25% in 2025. Also the younger cohorts moving into the labor force are smaller as well.
"retired" at 25-30 is also pretty common, or at minimum self employed and fully sustainable while putting in only 10-20 hours a week usually for 2-3 days a week.