They had enough money to retire. Then the cost of living went up.

When Diane Wetherington retired from a long career as a purchasing and contracting agent in 2020, she thought she had enough money to live comfortably, travel the world and babysit her six grandsons.

But confined to her Altamonte Springs, Florida, home during the COVID-19 pandemic, she had to do something to keep busy. So, she began consulting for local government agencies and picked up a part-time remote job.

As the cost of living crept up, Wetherington discovered she couldn’t stop working and still afford the basics of her life and the overseas trips twice a year. Now, even those adventures are on hold until she can figure out “where the economy is going,” she said. 

“I was good financially with my retirement until everything started going up like house and car insurance, and now, food and ‌everything else,” Wetherington, 73, said. “Luckily, it’s something I enjoy doing. But I will probably have to work as long as I possibly can to be able to afford to live.”

Wetherington belongs to a growing wave ‌of “unretirees” who are rejoining the workforce and working well past the traditional retirement age of ‌65.

A new AARP survey of adults 50 and older shared exclusively with USA TODAY found that 1 in 10 retirees are replacing their bucket lists with the 9-to-5 grind, many of them out of economic necessity.

What’s shattering the dream of retirement now? Four in 10 older Americans said they are either looking for a job or are back at work just to afford everyday living expenses. 

“To me, that’s eye-opening,” Carly Roszkowski, vice president ​of financial resilience programming at AARP, told USA TODAY. “It’s not just ‘I’m afraid I am going to outlive my ‌retirement savings.’ It’s specifically ‘I am having trouble affording everyday living ⁠costs today.’”

Why older Americans can’t afford to retire

More Americans are working into their 60s and 70s because of longer life spans, the desire to stay connected and to have a sense of purpose. 

About 38 million Americans aged 55 and older are ‌working or looking for work, more than 2.5 times the number of older adults 40 years ago, according to AARP.

This seismic demographic shift has reshaped the workforce, with older Americans accounting for nearly a quarter of workers today.

What’s different now: Financial pressures are growing the ranks of the “unretired,” Roszkowski said. 

For decades, a combination of pensions and Social Security ‌made a secure retirement possible for many.

Today, Social Security pays less than half of average wages, and many older Americans don’t have enough stowed in savings or 401(k) accounts to weather a financial shock, let alone afford the rising cost of living.

In the past six months, 7% of retirees said they have “unretired” or returned to the workforce, more than double the average number, the AARP survey found. Nearly half said their ‌primary motivation was to make money, with the desire ​to stay active ‌a distant second at 14%. 

Retirement research has consistently found that income is the top reason retirees rejoin the workforce, but not by such a wide margin, Roszkowski said.

High cost of living shreds safety nets

T. Rowe Price estimates that 20% of retirees hold down part- or full-time jobs, with another 7% seeking employment. Single retirees and women are much more likely to cite income as the reason for ‌unretiring during their golden years.

Too many of these older Americans are living on the edge, said Angela Antonelli, executive director of the Center for Retirement Initiatives at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. 

More than 1 in 5 households over the age of 65 rely on Social Security for more than 90% of their income and ​more than half of households over the age of 55 have nothing saved for retirement, she said. 

“While older workers are the fastest growing segment of the labor force, too many are not there by choice,” Antonelli said. 

Now, the high cost of living is shredding what safety net they had, said Geoffrey Sanzenbacher, a research fellow at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

If retirees who are increasingly worried about paying for groceries, housing, health care and utilities don’t get ⁠some relief, “you will see more people wanting to come off the sidelines and unretire,” Sanzenbacher said. “The question then is: Will they be ​able to?”

The unemployment rate is up while hiring is sputtering and that will make it harder for many retirees forced to look for ⁠work to find it, he said. 

“And those folks are exactly the ones who tend to have problems. The people who need to unretire are the ones who don’t have a lot of savings and don’t have a lot of things to fall back on,” Sanzenbacher said.