If you own stocks or real estate, you’re probably richer than you were when the pandemic began. That could put early retirement within reach. Taking such a step is still risky.
Many are already taking the plunge. Roughly 4.2 million people left the workforce while the pandemic spread across the country, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis senior economist Miguel Faria-e-Castro, and more than one in three did so partly because of rising portfolio and home values. This helped push the percentage of retirees in the U.S. population to 19.4% as of October 2021, up from 18.3% in early 2020.
Greg Gressel decided to retire after being laid off from his job at
Hershey Co.
in 2020. The 56-year-old, who now lives in Durango, Colo., said he felt comfortable doing so because a bull market and rise in his home’s value…
