Mark and Wanda Taylor, a couple on the verge of retirement, have decided to fire their financial advisor. “We are not really sure about how to plan for retirement,” Wanda told us at a recent workshop. “What we are most uncomfortable with is that we aren’t convinced that our advisor understands how to plan for retirement either!”
Mark adds: “We seem to have a lot of investment discussions and how we’ll have to change the way that we invest. Our advisor continues to talk about income options, asset allocation and capital preservation. Hey, we know these are important but he never even asks us what we want to do in the future.”
Like many pre-retirees and retirees, the Taylors aren’t sure what they need to plan for or what life might look like in the future. While it is critical to plan ahead, the challenge with retirement planning is not simply building a financial or investment plan but clarifying what they are planning for and how that relates back to the plan!
Proper retirement is not just a financial exercise. Many clients need education on the context that drives the plan. What areas of life will be most affected by a better understanding of retirement lifestyle issues? What changes can be anticipated in the future that require planning today? What resources are available in the community, government programs or through the advisor that can help clients understand this retirement life they are entering?
Are you prepared to support them in these areas? If not, consider this:
Retirement is more than a 30-year weekend or building a bucket list. This phase of life moves your client from the excitement of leaving work behind through to their elder years and mental or physical decline.
You are not just a “retirement planner.” You are an “aging” planner, helping people move through their later ages and stages of life. Your role in your client’s life is to help them understand how the financial resources they have can make their life transitions easier.
Here are three things pre-retirees and retirees may be looking for from their advisor:
- Talk to your clients about what retirement looks like to them. How do they define what their own retirement should be? Are they in alignment with their partner? What role will work play? What do they see as possible impediments to their ideal life?
Whether your client realizes it or not, there are many aspects to this phase of life that they may not yet understand or have thought about. Remember the law of clarity?
“People don’t know what they don’t know, because people don’t know what they don’t know!”
- Take a life-based approach to retirement planning. Start with life issues and objectives — goals, family dynamics, health, replacing work, how life may change through the various stages — before working out the financial and investment strategy. Think in terms of spending plans that focus on how clients use their money rather than on income plans that are driven by financial strategies. Focus on creating financial comfort to give them confidence that they have planned for, and can manage through, both the expected and the unexpected.
Clients like Mark and Wanda are looking for insight from their advisor on what they can expect during the multiple phases of retirement. Insight comes from your education, experience and the support of your team of experts and it goes beyond the financial insight that most advisors provide. While general retirement advice is important, it doesn’t get to the level of “insight” unless it is based on your thorough understanding of the retirement issues, needs and concerns that your clients face and how they may evolve over time.
- Be a coach for your clients and a valued partner in their plans for the future. As your client’s retirement advisor, one of your roles is to help coach your client to think beyond the perpetual holiday, the travel plans and the vacation in the sun. These are the exciting opportunities that many people think of as they plan for the future. However, they compete with health and relationship issues, lifestyle changes and social changes and they may impact their legacy as well. Guide your clients will a well-rounded approach that includes a LifeMap that keeps everything they should be thinking about front and center.
“Retirement” is just life, so no doubt there will be challenges as life goes on that could stress even the best plans. It is the responsibility of the advisor to continuously provide clarity through client education, have an ongoing discovery process they use to keep planning topics front and center, and make relevant, helpful information available to their clients as they age.
If you want to be your clients’ retirement advisor for life, this is what they need.
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Advisor Insights 
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