NAPERVILLE, IL — Gary Voss, a 67-year-old retired logistics manager who had not opened his Fidelity account since wishing his grandchildren a Merry Christmas over Zoom, sat down at his kitchen table Monday morning, entered his password on the third try, looked at the screen for approximately eleven seconds, and then dialed the direct line of the man who replaced him at Midwest Pallet & Crate.
Voss, who retired in October on what his financial planner had described as ‘a very comfortable glide path,’ was reportedly informed by his Target Retirement 2025 Fund that the glide path now ended in a ravine. According to family members, he did not say anything for a full minute, then asked his wife where his old steel-toed boots were, then asked if she remembered the password to LinkedIn.
‘A lot of recent retirees are entering what we call the re-entry phase,’ said Marcy Linden, a certified financial planner with Greatwater Advisory Group in Schaumburg. ‘They open the app, they see the number, they close the app, they open the app again to make sure the number is still the number, and then they call somebody named Doug.’
By 11:47 a.m. Central, Voss had reportedly accepted a part-time consulting role at his former employer at roughly 60% of his old salary, agreed to drive to a warehouse in Bolingbrook on Wednesday, and asked Doug whether the company still did the Friday lunch order from Portillo’s. He was informed that they did, but that the company now only covered the sandwich.
Linden noted that Voss’s situation is increasingly common across the Midwest, where target-date funds designed to gradually reduce risk as retirement approaches have been credited with successfully reducing the risk that anyone retires at all. She added that her firm had spent the morning fielding calls from clients who wanted to know whether their portfolios were ‘diversified enough,’ a question she described as ‘extremely retrospective.’
Voss’s wife, Janet, told reporters her husband seemed ‘energized’ by the prospect of returning to work, though she noted he had also spent twenty minutes in the garage staring at a snowblower without moving. She said she planned to cancel their May trip to Branson, the cabin deposit on Lake Geneva, and a standing 9 a.m. tee time he had been looking forward to since 1998.
Reached for comment, Voss declined to discuss his portfolio specifically but did say that the phrase ‘sequence of returns risk,’ which his advisor had explained to him in 2023 using a laminated chart, had finally clicked. He added that he was looking forward to once again having somewhere to be, and to once again not knowing what the S&P 500 was doing on any given Monday.
At press time, Voss was attempting to remember which drawer contained his reading glasses, his old badge, and the will to begin again.