Long before what became known as the Great Resignation, Lisa Brown said she had been helping her clients to get out of corporate America as fast as they can.
“I have seen a lot of clients who spent their careers in corporate America and burnout was real, and that was most evident from the higher paying professional jobs,” said Brown, a partner at CI Brightworth Private Wealth.
Brown, whose clientele is mostly corporate executives, said she has repeatedly seen how a low-stress environment can benefit people and add years to their lives. “After someone retires and they come in the office, you see this every time. They sit back in their chair, their shoulders relaxed, lines have disappeared off their face, and in many cases, they have lost some weight,” she said.
“They have more time to take care of themselves. I have seen just tremendous value in quality of life in my client experience,” she said.
Many of her clients, like the millions of workers who began to re-evaluate their lives during and after the pandemic, have had enough of their work life as they know it, she said. “They have been raising their hands and saying, 'I am done. I want to spend my time doing more than working,'" said Brown, who along with Susan Bradley of the Sudden Money Institute, participated in a panel, titled "The Great Resignation and Unretirement," at the Invest In Women conference last week in Atlanta, sponsored by Financial Advisor.
Over the past two years, Brown said she has had numerous conversations with clients regarding their timeframe for leaving leave jobs and what’s next for them. “Sometimes, we are the ones bringing up the conversation, but more often than not, it’s the clients,” she said. “That’s what they want to talk about, not so much their portfolio."
She said that clients are having to deal with many factors, such as the housing market, aging and gray divorce, that are driving them into new decisions that they thought were already set in place. “There are all kinds of things that are coming up for plans in this climate of uncertainty,” she said, noting that unretirement is one of the bigger challenges for people who have already left the corporate world.
For those people, she said the feathers are suddenly hitting the fan. “The money that was supposed to be there to support them isn’t there, particularly if they didn’t have a financial planner to help them move into that decision,” she said.
Brown said she sees more people pivoting from full-time jobs in corporations to the gig economy. She said as soon as these “very successful professionals” announce their resignation or retirement, their phones begin to ring off the hook, with other companies offering them consulting positions. “Some of these clients have decided to form their own LLC, take on certain projects as they wish, and that’s great and they are happy with that,” she said. “It provides that nice bridge from big paycheck to no paycheck.” Moreover, Brown said, there is a network of gig economy workers that provides consulting work.
She relayed an example of one of her clients who years ago had stressful job in aviation. He went fishing for six months and did not take any calls, but when he returned, he had several voicemails offering him consulting jobs. This client, Brown said, is someone who went through money faster than he realized, even with the great financial planning that he had gotten for years. “But he took six months off to decompress and he hit the reset button,” she said, noting that his is a successful unretirement story.