In the last half of last year, we heard a lot of talk (and we at NPR did a lot of talking) about the Great Resignation, aka the Big Quit. This was a trend that started right around the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and saw — anecdotally, at least — large numbers of people leaving their jobs voluntarily. There was some controversy about the Big Quit, not the least because some reporting on the trend made it sound as though many of these workers had decided to leave the labor force forever.
But the hard data — particularly here in the U.S. — suggests that in fact the labor force participation rate, which plunged at the beginning of 2020, recovered pretty quickly. That included workers close to retirement age. Which suggests that people weren’t actually quitting work altogether, but were, rather, just switching jobs — in many cases leaving jobs that paid well but required long hours, and finding jobs that perhaps paid less but gave them more control over their lives. In other words, it was less the Great Resignation and more the Great Reshuffle.
That’s certainly the conclusion that Jill Schlesinger reached. Schlesinger is a certified financial planner and a business analyst at CBS News. She’s also the author of a new book, The Great Money Reset, which draws on her experience talking with callers to her personal finance podcast, Jill on Money. Many of those callers were considering their own Big Quit, but they weren’t sure whether they could do it, or how to go about it.
For most financial planners, the hardest part of conversations is talking about the end game. People are happy to discuss retirement all day long. After all, they’re anticipating a good time, when they can travel, or see family, and do all the things they’ve put off doing for forty years. But talking about what happens to their money and their assets when they die? No one ever wanted to talk about that before the pandemic.
