Updated Sept. 20, 2026, 12:32 p.m. ET
Cynthia Hennessy hit some low points after getting laid off from her corporate lawyer position in 2024, at age 61. The lowest probably came when she was rejected for a job driving the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.
“When you are laid off, you can’t help but feel it’s because you aren’t any good, not smart enough, not talented,” she said.
There’s no good time to lose your job. But there may be no worse time than around age 60.
At that age, workers are close enough to retirement that no prospective employer is likely to hire them expecting a long-term relationship.
“They may find themselves trapped between being too old to hire and too young to retire,” said Catherine Collinson, CEO of the nonprofit Transamerica Institute.
And what age is “too old” to get a good job? When the Transamerica Institute asked that question in a 2023 survey of employers, most companies replied diplomatically that it “depends on the person.” But some employers acknowledged age bias in hiring. The median age they gave as too old to hire: 58.
When Transamerica posed the same question in 2025, employers gave an older age as “too old to hire”: 65. The real number may lie somewhere in between.
In any case, most workers are not quite old enough to retire at 58, at least not in comfort. Social Security doesn’t become available until age 62. Medicare, federal health insurance for retirees, kicks in at 65.
And many workers aren’t quite ready to retire at 62 or 65, let alone at 58.
“I’m 62 now,” said Hennessy, of Seattle. “That seems too young. I’ve worked my whole life. I love working.”
Here are the stories of 10 Americans who lost their jobs around age 60: Too old to get rehired, too young to retire. They spoke to USA TODAY with help from the Reddit community r/retirement.
‘I’ve worked my whole life. I love working’
Hennessy had worked at AT&T and its subsidiary, DirecTV, for nearly 25 years when the company laid her off in a reorganization.
“They had already written the announcement for the company that I was retiring,” she said.
Hennessy was not retiring. The company was shrinking, and Hennessy had a high salary. She went on LinkedIn and wrote about the stress and stigma of losing a job.
Later on, she posted on LinkedIn about not getting the Wienermobile job.
“They only hire recent college graduates,” Hennessy said. Her post argued that the company should hire older drivers. After that, she became known in social media circles as “the Wienermobile lady.”
Hennessy eventually found a job as an attorney at the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America. The pay is much lower, but she says she couldn’t be happier.
“It’s less responsibility,” she said. “It’s super-interesting, but I’m also only working 8 to 5, and I don’t work on weekends.” She used to work “every day, all day long,” but no longer.
In her extra time, Hennessy is taking art and writing classes, playing mahjong and caring for her elderly parents.
“You can’t argue with hope and joy,” she said.
‘We’re not doing this again’
At age 61, Todd Fannin decided he’d had enough of late-career layoffs.
Fannin had held a series of high-paying jobs at insurance companies. By 2019, at age 55, he was living in the Atlanta area and earning more than $200,000 a year. When the company downsized, he spent eight months searching for another position, finally landing one in Tampa. He and his wife, Carrie, moved.
When that job fell through, Todd spent six months on the market, driving an Uber for extra cash, until another high-salary position opened up, and the Fannins moved again.
That pattern played out for several years until, in January 2025, Todd Fannin lost another good-paying job. Carrie told Todd, “We’re not doing this again.”
The Fannins gave up on corporate jobs and started looking for a business they could run themselves.
“If I get fired again,” Todd Fannin said, “I want it to be Carrie firing me.”
After a search, they settled on Archadeck Outdoor Living, a deck and patio company that sells franchises to regional owners.
The Fannins purchased the Archadeck franchise for an area in northwest Georgia. They have since added territory in the Atlanta region. Archadeck of Northwest Georgia now serves an area of 3,500 square miles. To purchase and market the franchises, the couple pulled $300,000 from their retirement savings.
The goal, the Fannins said, is to generate between $650,000 and $2.5 million in annual revenue over the next few years.
“Our approach is that we are building an asset that we will sell in the future,” Todd Fannin said. “We are committed to about a seven-year plan to make that happen.”
But the first year was a struggle, and the Fannins know they are risking their retirement savings. Todd is 62 now, and he still plans to retire “at 65 or so,” but the couple’s new business could keep him working till 70.
“We really did have the option of not doing any of this, and just living a smaller life,” said Carrie Fannin, who is now 55. “My plan is to be the deck queen of Georgia.”
‘I must have sent out a thousand resumes’
Fourteen years ago, at age 60, Margaret Bowles lost her job as an attorney at a real estate investment trust in Houston.
Those were dark days in the real estate industry, which was pulling out of the Great Recession.
“There were no jobs,” Bowles recalled. “I must have sent out a thousand resumes, and nobody responded.”
Facing a mortgage “and bills and everything else,” she said, Bowles picked up contracting work and anything else to bring money in.
Then, she turned to her side hustle.
Bowles had walked into the Houston Chronicle newsroom one day and offered her services as a sports photographer. She started shooting high school football on weekends, “and in Texas, that’s a big deal,” she said.
After the job loss, Bowles started “doing more of it, as much as I could do,” shooting pictures for the Chronicle and the Associated Press. She built a portfolio and a contact list.
Soon, photography became a full-time job. Bowles worked her way up to shooting the NFL, one of the top assignments in sports.
Today, at 74, Bowles works for the AP. She covers the NFL and shoots more than 40 games a year, flying out twice a week from her new home in Colorado.
“I’ve photographed the Olympics, the Super Bowl multiple times, the national collegiate championship, all in the 14 years since I was laid off,” she said.
It’s hard work.
“The equipment is heavy, because you’re carrying these big, long lenses,” she said. “And you have to run to stay ahead of the action. I’ve clocked it: It’s about four miles per game. If you’ve got back-to-back games, you’re running eight miles. And I’m a petite, 74-year-old woman.
“I work out. I lift weights. I do all this stuff so I can continue to do this,” Bowles said, because most other NFL photographers “are male, and they’re half my age.”
Bowles has retirement savings, but no immediate plans to retire.
Shooting NFL games “keeps me engaged in the world, it makes me feel needed, it makes me feel relevant,” she said. “And retiring has never been an ambition of mine.
“I guess people retire so they can do the things they love to do,” she said. “But if you’re already doing the things you love to do…”
‘Will I be sharp enough to work?’
Steve Goodrich is 63, but he’s years away from retiring in comfort.
Goodrich is a software engineer based in Colorado. Over 38 years, he’s been out of work eight or nine times, “sometimes for months at a time,” he said. “My savings has been eaten up every time that’s happened.”
In terms of retirement savings, financial planners tell Goodrich he’s “about 54% of the way” toward saving enough to retire safely. “And this is late in the game to be trying to make up 46%.”
The last layoff came in March. Goodrich applied to more than 150 positions over five months before landing a new job in the defense industry.
He expects to keep working for at least seven more years, to age 70, and more likely into his 70s, before he has enough savings to retire.
He wonders, “Will I be sharp enough to work, and will I be able to keep up with some of the younger bucks?
“I have the experience. I have the ability,” he said. “What I don’t have any more is the endurance. I can’t pull two or three all-nighters in a row. I can’t do that anymore.”
‘At some point, you’re just too old to be in tech’
As she neared age 60, Joanne Dority started to see a pattern with job prospects: She would go through interview after interview until she encountered a manager who was around her age. They would hit it off, and she would get the job.
That was how she got her last job, a sales position at a cloud-based AI company.
“The person who hired me was my age. He likes boomers,” she said.
Then, that guy lost his job, and Dority got transferred from team to team “like a pawn in a chess game,” she said.
Dority took family leave to care for her father, who was in end-stage dementia. When she returned to work, she said, her much-younger manager began building a case for her dismissal.
Dority said she forwarded a particularly caustic performance review to her personal email account so she could send it to an attorney. The company treated the action as theft, she said, and fired her. The termination came three days before Dority’s 62nd birthday.
She returned to the job market and went through many interviews. Every time she encountered a younger group of hiring supervisors, she’d get cut.
“At some point,” she reasoned, “you’re just too old to be in tech.”
Dority was about to give up when she made a connection on LinkedIn with someone around her age who was hiring. Now, she’s employed again, on a team of older workers.
Dority started her new job in June. She plans to work “at least until 65, and kind of see how it goes,” she said. Her biggest expense is her adult daughter, who still lives at the family home in Seattle and is underemployed.
“I could easily retire,” she said. “It’s not a financial issue. It’s more psychological: I like to have stuff to do.”
His biggest challenge ‘is going from saver to spender’
Gerry Elam and his wife, Sandy, always lived “like we were retiring the next day,” he said. “We always lived way below our income.”
In 2007, for example, the couple considered moving to a bigger house. Then they thought better of it. They decided to remain in their old house and to double down on the mortgage. They paid it off in 2010, shortly after the Great Recession hit.
Because the Elams had lived on a budget, retirement, when it arrived, wasn’t so much of a shock.
In April 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic economic downturn, Gerry Elam learned his team at General Electric was being downsized from five employees to three. He had just turned 62. Rather than compete for his job, he volunteered to retire.
Elam has a small pension, worth about $36,000 a year, and a large retirement account.
His retirement-savings success story is a minor miracle: For many years, Elam had kept his 401(k) balance invested entirely in GE stock, or in cash. Few investment advisers would keep a client’s funds in a single stock, because individual stocks are volatile.
But Elam managed to ride out the stock’s downturns, and by the time he handed the account over to a financial planner, in 2018, it was valued in the “high six figures,” he said.
“My directive to him was, ‘I did a pretty good job building this up. Don’t blow it,'” Elam said.
The financial planner had told Elam he was free to retire whenever he wanted. The couple left their home in Phoenix and moved to a property in Opelika, Alabama, where they had built a retirement home: 10 acres of pine forest near Auburn University, where Elam attended college.
At 62, Elam was eligible for Social Security, but the checks would have been comparatively small. He had a three-year wait for Medicare.
“We were extremely fortunate,” Elam said. “My former employer continued my health insurance until I became eligible for Medicare.” The employer also agreed to insure Sandy, who is 62, until she reaches 65.
Elam is now 68. He plans to take Social Security at 70, claiming the largest possible monthly checks. That benefit and his pension will deliver $90,000 a year.
His wife, Sandy, still works as a mortgage underwriter. He has told her she can retire whenever she wants.
Elam’s biggest struggle has been adjusting to spending his money, rather than saving it. He overthinks every major purchase. His biggest indulgence is his motorcycle, a Suzuki V-Strom.
“All those years of living below our means have given us so many options now,” he said. “I feel unbelievably blessed that things have worked out.”
‘It’s hard to get motivated at my age’
Jacqueline Kortz of Scottsdale, Arizona, had a dream job: fully remote, with a six-figure salary, in the HR department of a medical software startup.
In June, the insurer laid her off, part of a workforce reduction.
Kortz is 60. She hadn’t really looked for a job since her early 50s. She launched a wary search.
“I was making good money. I had a fully remote job, which was great. And many of the jobs that I’m seeing are in the office, or hybrid,” she said. “It’s hard to get motivated at my age for that.”
Kortz says she will keep looking for work until the end of the year.
“People are online saying, ‘It took me over two years to find a job.’ And I don’t want that kind of stress,” she said. “When you’re desperate, you’re more likely to do something stupid.”
If nothing good comes through, Kortz will retire early. Her financial adviser says she can make it work.
The biggest downside is health insurance, which will cost her more than $1,200 a month.
Kortz is searching for ways around that expense. Paying for health insurance out of pocket would mean digging into her retirement savings before she’s eligible for Social Security.
She may claim the retirement benefit at 62, even though it will mean smaller checks. She calls it her “soft launch” into early retirement.
‘We are older, but it’s not like we’re dead’
In early 2025, Ananda Arasu was laid off from his marketing position and entered a job market already saturated with people like him.
Arasu had spent five years at Autodesk, the software firm, and at age 58, he thought he might finish his career there.
“The culture was really good, the pay was decent, the benefits were good,” he said.
The company gave him a severance package and covered three months of health insurance. After that, Arasu faced a common dilemma: He was too young to claim Social Security, and way too young for Medicare.
The job market looked bleak.
“The market was flooded, basically, with a lot of professionals, white-collar people, in a lot of senior positions,” he said.
To counter age bias, a counselor advised him to focus his résumé on the last 15 years, and to omit the dates of his academic degrees.
Last fall, Arasu found a temporary solution: He returned to Autodesk as a contractor. The contracting work paid “pretty close to what I was making take-home” as a permanent employee, he said, but without the health insurance.
He’s still looking for something more permanent to help support himself and his family. His wife works in real estate. They have two grown children who are living at home.
“I still have a lot to give,” Arasu said. “We are older, but it’s not like we’re dead.”
‘I don’t want to stop’
When JoAnne Kim lost her marketing job in a corporate restructuring in 2023, she was 62 and living in Qatar.
It was an awkward moment: She felt too young to retire. The job market proved much harder than she expected. And she had to find a way out of Qatar.
JoAnne and Yunki Kim had lived overseas for nine years. Rather than return to the United States, the couple looked at other countries with warm climes and reasonable costs. They eventually chose Mérida, Mexico, one of the safest large cities in the Americas.
They moved in early 2024 and settled into semi-retirement. Yunki, who was 65, took Social Security. JoAnne, who was 62, decided to wait.
Then, Yunki got a remote contractor job as a data engineer for SoFi, the financial technology company. He put his Social Security payments on hold.
This year, SoFi offered Yunki a permanent job with benefits.
The Kims weighed their options. They were only breaking even in Mérida, and they struggled with the tropical heat.
They opted to move. Hired drivers carried them more than 3,000 miles over five days to the suburbs of Philadelphia, navigating massive potholes and long stretches between public restrooms. A wheel on their trailer broke outside Saltillo.
Now, the Kims are settled in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and working on reclaiming their U.S. driver’s licenses.
“At 64,” JoAnne wrote on her Substack, “I’m beginning to understand that there’s a difference between slowing down and stopping. I don’t want to stop.”
‘All of a sudden you don’t have a paycheck’
Joe Miccichè always told himself he wanted to retire early. When the opportunity arrived, he wasn’t so sure.
Three years ago, at age 58, Miccichè was laid off from his network engineer job.
“I was given two months’ notice, virtually no severance, and got to train my replacement in India,” he said.
The terms were hardly ideal. But Miccichè had thought a lot about retiring early, and now he could.
He consulted with his financial adviser, who said he had more than enough savings to retire. He spoke to three investment management firms, and all three agreed that he could safely retire.
Over the past year, changes to the Affordable Care Act threatened to derail his retirement plan. Congress elected not to renew COVID-era Obamacare subsidies. Insurance costs skyrocketed for families buying insurance through the federal program.
“Our premiums have gone up, what was it, 261%,” he said. “We had to revisit everything, all the assumptions we made, the planning.”
Surviving unexpected expenses is part of retirement planning, and Miccichè believes his retirement budget is still on track.
Miccichè is now 61 and his wife, Susana, is 62. She’s going to apply for Social Security now, while Miccichè himself plans to wait until at least age 65, a common strategy for married couples.
The hardest part of the plan, Miccichè said, is getting used to spending all of that savings.
“Transitioning from saving to withdrawing is, I don’t know what the right word for it is,” he said. “It’s not trivial, and it’s really hard to get the head around.”
“When you’ve been working for 30-some years and all of a sudden you don’t have a paycheck,” he said, “no matter how many people tell you you’re doing fine financially… It was just very difficult for me to accept.”