Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of interviews with leaders on topics of timely importance to financial advisors. These articles are based on Steve Sanduski’s interviews on his podcast, Between Now and Success.
The concept of retirement is changing before our eyes and Mark Casady is a prime example.
Casady has pretty much seen it all in his 30-plus years in financial services. But after serving as chairman of the board and CEO for LPL Financial, where he led the company through its IPO and grew it into the fifth largest brokerage firm in the United States, Casady is now seeing things from the other side of the financial planning spectrum: as a retiree.
Casady “retired” earlier this year and I had to ask him how you go from being a high-powered CEO of a publically traded company to a retired baby boomer.
“Well, after about three months of not working day-to-day at LPL, my wife looked at me and said, ‘Do you realize you've not even taken me to lunch once?’” Casady quipped. “I said, ‘I was trying to avoid that! Not because I don't want to spend time with you, but because that just seems so cliché, to take you to lunch all the time now that we have more time together.’”
Of course, like many retirees these days, Casady’s retirement is more active than he’s letting on. He’s putting his lifetime of skills and experience to use as a general partner and advisory board chairman of Vestigo Ventures, which invests in early stage fintech companies. In fact, Casady doesn’t really think about this stage in his life as “retirement.” He prefers “Life 2.0.”
“I will admit to being a planner, so I've studied the subject of what to do when you leave the formal corporate life and how to think about your time, and think about what's important to you in the next phase,” Casady says. “And that's where I coined this idea of ‘Life 2.0’ as a way of really denoting that. It's not really retirement, in the sense of our parents’ retirement.”
The son of an Episcopal minister who moved to a new church every two years, Casady credits his somewhat itinerant childhood with helping him ease the transition into retired life. “I've always learned to adopt to whatever the new situation was,” Casady remembers. “And if you tell me, you're the CEO of LPL, then I do the things CEO's does. If you tell me I'm a general partner in a venture fund, then I'm that. I've always had an ability to switch off and on, I think because of that early childhood experience.”
Passions In Retirement
Perhaps another secret to Casady’s successful retirement is that his new position at Vestigo allows him to pursue the things he is truly passionate about—an increasingly important component of retirement planning for people from all walks of life. In Casady’s case, “It never was important to me to be the CEO in the sense of the power that it represents. What I did it for was really two things. One was I loved seeing people that I worked with doing things they could never imagine doing. And the second was to create employment in which people can take home a good salary, buy a house, have kids, do whatever's important to them. So, I can do that in this life, just in a different way than I did in the last one.”