Retirement is like other life events that modify or change us. It doesn’t automatically dissolve unwanted or leftover parts. In other words, retiring from your job or career won’t necessarily make you happy, feel closer to your spouse, become more motivated to take care of your health or slow down your drinking or use of pain meds. In fact, more time and fewer distractions (which tend to come with retirement) might actually make them worse.
Just as burrs can cause manufacturing problems by concentrating stress, and increasing the risks of corrosion and unwanted friction, proper retirement planning needs more quality control measures to make sure unwanted things don’t govern the aspects everyday retirement life.
Deburring can also be one of the most costly manufacturing processes. That’s why a lot of time and energy is devoted to positioning the burr so that it can be easily removed, or placed in a spot where it has minimal impact on the part’s functionality.
Sadly, most retirement advisors and clients spend the majority of their time and energy together machining just one single component of a successful transition into retirement … the financial elements. To make matters worse, most of the problems people have in retirement don’t have anything to do with money. They fail because there is a breakdown in one or more of other key aspects of retirement, such as the mental, social, physical or spiritual aspects.
Retirement burrs can come in the form of a sudden or forced retirement, aging parents, adult children, loss of a loved one, divorce, medical diagnosis, a deteriorating social network, natural aging, depression, addiction, financial loss or some form of fraud, to name a few. The recurring list of potential problems constantly threatening retirees demands that they be treated as facts of life in the retirement planning process.
Advisors need to develop written policies and procedures for managing these threats and reducing their incidence. That means being up front about the realities of retirement. It’s time to stop painting pretty little picture-perfect lives that will be carefree and easy once they don’t have to show up to work, see their co-workers every day or be a slave to their daily schedule.
We’ve got to tell people there is, in fact, a dark side to retirement, and that if there’s no plan to stay relevant, connected, physically sharp and spiritually engaged, the potential for a breakdown in the machine goes up dramatically. No matter how much money one has, or how modern one’s machining tools and simulators, there are things that can’t be perfectly modeled or engineered when it comes to retirement.
Once the decision has been made to identify retirement burrs, and there’s a plan to address them, the decision to either fix them oneself, or farm out the problem to a qualified “deburring” shop must be made.
Fortunately for advisors, there is a growing list of tools and professionals available to help. The number of books addressing the non-financial aspects of retirement is growing rapidly. Six years ago when I released my book Naked Retirement, few, if any, people even had the concept on their radar.