All Pilots should target 60 as the age which they have the financial resources to retire. Due to 2 reasons (i) Passing the medical can be difficult after 60 (ii) changing job after 60 is more difficult. If you have not achieved this then normally it is down to poor decision making.
Not really! Few long serving pilots will have achieved that landmark by “poor decision making.” You can “target” whatever you like, but unfortunately life tends to throw up a full time obstacle course to most people. When I started airline flying the retirement age was 55. I paid what seemed like a large relative chunk of money into something called a “Defined benefit Pension fund.” My employers claimed that they paid an even bigger chunk of money into it, The “oldies” claimed it was “Gold plated” and I could look forward to retiring on 60% of my best average three years (in the last 10) earnings for the rest of my life, all index linked. My mortgage (with its then 15% interest rate!) would be paid off and I could happily tend to the garden while offering my happy laughing grandkids an endless supply of lint covered toffees from my pocket. Admittedly, my investments in Apple stock was best summed up by buying three fruit trees which yielded far less than the garden centre brochure promised. Nevertheless, I don’t feel I really made bad decisions?
The trouble was that “life” got in the way and governments, lawyers and money markets found our pensions simply irresistible and it turns out that they too weren’t quite as gold plated as they had once promised to be. But never mind, as the years rolled on so 60 became the new retirement bar which gave those who needed or wanted to, the opportunity to repair their retirement shoebox with a longer working longevity. Then came the financial crises and the changes to terms / conditions and job security that resulted. By now the retirement bar was reset to 65, and again, for those who needed to or wanted to and physically could, the option to mitigate the damage was further extended.
When retirement is but a distant prospect, you have the opportunity to prostitute your talents as you see fit. When retirement is visibly on the horizon, the realisation quickly dawns that the “shoebox” is going to have to provide everything for an indeterminate amount of time. If it’s full you can bet your life that you will keel over the month you retire. If it’s not so pretty then the likelihood is that you will live to be older than Methuselah! When you are working, price inflation is eventually balanced by wage inflation. In retirement, inflation is going to be a mortal enemy. A lifetime of good earnings and the dreams of a comfortable retirement becomes a real worry in that last decade. All those promises you made to retire early, start to dissolve into “maybe just another year?” As for the 40 year old who thinks it is morally repugnant that you don’t cast yourself adrift whilst themselves having few moral compunctions about selling his soul for a tax free salary to a regime that treats him/her as nothing more than the hired help.......Meh!... Sell yourself to the Chinese for more, and stop worrying about my morals!
As for medicals...It is obviously true that the older you get the greater the risk of natural attrition, but in reality if you made it this far there is a very good chance that after being told off by the AME for your ever expanding waistline, provided you manage to stay broadly within the published numbers, your ticket will reflect your career decision and go on for another 6 months or a year.