When Should You Retire?

There’s retirement, and there’s pre-retirement. When should you end your working life? When should you give up a job that might very well have defined you? Retirement obviously has enormous appeal for millions of Americans, but it also has its pitfalls. You can retire too soon. You can wait too long to quit. You can plan insufficiently. You can be over-confident about just how golden your golden years are going to be.

Bill Marimow is a journalistic legend in Philadelphia – a major figure at The Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper that, in its distinguished pre-digital days under Marimow’s brilliant boss Gene Roberts, won sixteen Pulitzer prizes. Marimow, who came to the Inquirer in 1972, just before Roberts, himself won two Pulitzers, in 1976 and 1985.  He was an investigative reporter who did groundbreaking work on police brutality in Philadelphia.

Marimow eventually became an editor and rose to the top at the Inquirer, and, at 72, as vice-president for strategic development, he’ll retire on December 31. There’ll be a party, with Roberts and other luminaries of the paper’s bygone days sending Marimow off in style.

A question I had for the retiree: Isn’t it especially difficult for a person who’s had a great career in a great institution to pack it in?  His answer: “If someone has worked for years at IBM or GM or Google or the East Podunk Gazette, the bottom line is that you’re going to miss your work.” 

But, he says, the name of the game is to find new directions and new challenges in retirement. “If,” he says, “you feel a sense of fulfillment in retirement it will blur or lessen the nostalgia you might feel for the career you’ve left.” His basic advice for retirees: “Don’t languish.” Marimow intends to teach, lecture, possibly make a documentary about investigative reporting, and write occasional op-Eds for the Inquirer in his retirement.

Marimow, who left the Inquirer for the Baltimore Sun and NPR in the early 90’s and returned to the paper later, has witnessed the continuing decline of the Inquirer from an industry giant to a paper struggling through the digital era with multiple owners and a depleted staff. In its heyday it had a staff of 535; today, the staff is 240. 

But the paper has stabilized in recent years, and one of Marimow’s executive roles has been to oversee the orientation of 125 new employees. Performing that role was a crucial factor in Marimow’s decision to finally retire at 72, as the company’s oldest executive. “I looked around and realized almost everyone I was helping through orientation could have been my child or grandchild,” he says. “You need to make room for the next generation.” 

And recently Marmow had another decisive epiphany about the retirement imperative. After a weekend visit to three of his grandchildren – he has six – in Wellesley, Mass., he had to drive back to Philadelphia at 4 a.m. to make a morning meeting and beat the New York traffic. “After five hours in the car,” he says, “I thought, this is no way for a 72-year-old guy to live.”

So, as of next year, he won’t live like that any more.