For many in the working world, retirement is the ultimate goal. However, what they don’t expect after reaching that goal is their desire to return back to work.

A 2010 study by associate professor of health care policy Nicole Maestas, PhD, has been featured in New York Times article investigating this phenomenon. Her research shows that nearly “50 percent of retirees follow a nontraditional retirement path that involves partial retirement and unretirement, and at least 26 percent of retirees later unretire”.

Maestas states that roughly 82 percent of retirees planned to either continue working or return to work before they originally retired. Contrary to popular belief, many retirees do not return to work due to financial hardship, but because they simply miss working and feeling a sense of purpose.

A new study by Maestas forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press and just released by the National Bureau of Economic Research takes a closer look at retirement planning. Many couples plan to retire together, however Maestas says that many women are missing out on money if they’re retiring at the same times as their husbands.

Women tend to marry older men, which leads many married women to retire at younger ages than their husbands. As women often have had shorter careers on account of childrearing and may have a longer life expectancy than men, this leaves them with less potential earnings and Social Security wealth. Maestas suggests that that the return to additional work beyond mid-life are greater for married women than for married men, and that the potential gain in Social Security wealth alone is enough to place married women on nearly equal footing with married men in terms of Social Security wealth at age 70.

This study has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.