Something to consider is pension lock. Your pension is tied to a specific employer, and leaving means losing everything. I hear this all the time from school teachers, but it also happened to my mom: Budget cuts were coming and while she had enough seniority to stay employed, she didn’t have enough juice for choice of location. She was going to have to accept a job that required an additional hour of commute that she couldn’t do for health reasons. So she had to leave 2 years shy of a pension. She got nothing, and she also doesn’t qualify for Social Security.