2. Create a retirement discovery process. Refresh the relationship. Once you’ve shared the phases of retirement, help clients visualize their hopes, clarify their priorities and acknowledge their worries about each phase. This signifies a new start for your relationship rather than an ending. If you want good ideas and some resources check out AARP’s “Life Reimagined” program. https://lifereimagined.aarp.org/.
3. Develop tools to help people “spend well.” Advisors focus on saving and investing, people think far more about cash flow. Positioning the discussion around making sure you are spending money on the right things, versus budgets with spending limits, is akin to a financial wellness approach. If you are the partner who helps clients maximize the happiness they get from the money they have, you are extremely relevant and valuable.
4. Communicate to retired clients differently. “Package and promote” your focus on working with retirees. Create a newsletter that only goes to people considering or in retirement. Offer targeted webinars about life (not just money) in retirement. Design clients’ deliverables like the discovery process or a special meeting agenda and performance review that encompasses spending and other client priorities.
5. Show empathy for the emotional challenges of retirement. Don’t congratulate your clients on retirement without an appreciation of how scary it can be. Help your clients by creating a community; connect them to each other, share their stories. Serve as a bulletin board for volunteer activities in your area and encourage people to get involved. It doesn’t take a certification as a life coach to make a real difference in people’s lives.
While the industry has clearly identified the need to reach to Gen X and millennials or starve over time, we face risk with the boomers too. We’ve positioned reaching retirement as an end state, a graduation from the many years of saving and investing—perhaps that means they don’t need you anymore? Without clarity about what comes next that makes an advisor valuable, no wonder some clients are secretly looking at lower cost options for managing their retirement.
To make it very apparent that what we do cannot be substituted with so-called “modern wealth management”, we need to create a specific offering for advice in retirement. Most retirement ads show a happy couple staring into the eyes of grandchildren or looking out to sea—it looks so easy. In fact, retirement is a dynamic time full of twists and turns where the human connection to an advisor who really knows you, your life goals, your emotions—not just your accounts—is more valuable than ever.
Gail Graham is CEO of Graham Strategy, dedicated to helping wealth managers build brands people love.