My colleague in the think tank Next Chapter, Frank McAleer of Raymond James, has a way of making the complex simple. I asked him to define “financial wellness.” He immediately answered, “Peace of mind!” He didn’t spin a Rubik’s cube of conditions, calculations or hedges about market performance. Instead, he doubled down on simplicity, “Clients want to know they are OK so they can sleep at night. The details are our job.”

If peace of mind means satisfying people’s anxieties and concerns, many advisors seem to expect clients to speak up. A recent survey of clients by the Alliance for Lifetime Income confirms that there’s still a gap between what advisors think clients want to talk about and real client concerns. “Investments” is usually the topic advisors always pick, and that’s not where the clients are. In a related question, nine out of 10 client respondents said they were interested in guaranteed income. Sounds like a “peace of mind” moment.

Let’s pile on insights from our friends at Allianz and their “2021 Retirement Risk Readiness Survey.” This study talks about what keeps clients up at night. The top client concerns are again healthcare costs (named by 71% of those in the survey) and the costs of living in retirement (named by 67%), numbers that are both up from 2020. But there’s a new bronze medalist among client worries: the impact of a market downturn (named by 66% of respondents, a 22% increase). The 12-and-a-half-year-old bull market is a big worry, especially among newly retired clients. No peace of mind here.

But the disconnect in priorities among advisors and clients is still the most important takeaway from both the Alliance and Allianz client surveys. While clients say they are more willing to talk about their concerns, for the most part they have not. And while advisors say they are plugged in, they too have mostly skirted the subjects of outliving money in retirement, healthcare and the potential for a market correction. Crazy.

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The impasse is partly caused by the complexity of the topics. The worry clients have about outliving their money requires multivariate equations. And how can you know about “outliving” anything if you don’t know how long you’re going to live?

Every planning conversation is chock-full of variables that can break even the most careful plan. How much have you saved? How long will you live? How healthy will you be? Those are the big questions, and they are accompanied by all kinds of other issues—and preferences and choices—that further complicate the picture. Do clients want to travel? Do they need a new roof? A new car? Two cars? Do their four daughters expect financial help for their weddings? Does a client’s 90-year-old mother want to stay in her home even though she has used up her cash? Will she require a continuous care retirement facility?

All of these questions usually return the answer, “Well, it depends …”

Actuarial tables don’t typically take into account new roofs or care facilities. So the savvy advisors working with pre-retirees have learned to probe and ask about the clients’ preferences, conditions and capabilities. People’s unprecedented longevity has complicated each analysis, adding more variables than can be easily integrated into a plan. It’s a tough job playing devil’s advocate for hopeful couples anticipating their retirement dreams. But it’s a very important job and is probably the highest value provided by financial advisors.

And the good news is that clients want to have the conversation. Can they trust you to be concerned?

All clients and families have some hot button issues. If you did nothing else in your practice but call people and ask them the same survey questions I’ve asked here, you’d get some solid opportunities with each client to further solidify your relationship and start alleviating their concerns. These might be difficult topics for clients, but it’s on us to make the first move. Certainly, there are a growing number of competitors willing to step in if we don’t.

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