Reconceptualizing retirement: A status-based approach

•A plethora of competing models of the stages of retirement impedes research.•Unlike stages, statuses are not mutually exclusive or sequential, thus truer to life.•Retirement statuses include: retrench, explore, try, involve, reconsider, and exit.

The one thing on which essentially all retirement scholars agree is that there is no generally accepted definition of the term “retirement.” Hence, it is not surprising that a plethora of competing models of the stages of retirement has been generated. To cut this Gordian knot, this paper proposes that the concept of statuses, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive or sequential, replace the idea of stages. Statuses better reflect observed human behavior and are more open to multicultural application, thus facilitating retirement research and clinical practice. The retirement statuses proposed here, which can exist in any combination or sequence, are retrenchment, exploration, try-out, involvement, reconsideration, and exiting (forming the acronym RETIRE).