“Let me see you start it,” is what I called out to my 15-year-old nephew. His mom had asked him to mow the lawn and this was only his second attempt at the task. He had already made sure there was gas in it and even primed the engine a couple times. He pulled the cord, and the engine barely made a sound. He was quick to troubleshoot the situation, remarking, “oh yea, I forgot the starting fluid.”

I was surprised because I hadn’t seen anyone use starting fluid on a gas mower since I was a kid, and the mower he was using looked relatively new. He went to the garage, grabbed the can, walked over and sprayed a healthy dose on it. He pulled the cord again and this time the engine responded with a low murmur but didn’t fire up.  He sprayed another round of fluid on it and gave the little red mower a stronger pull. The engine roared to life, creating a memorable smile and a quick comment, “I guess it just needed more starting fluid.”

The entire event was comical and left me dumbfounded because he was spraying the starting fluid into the muffler, which is where the exhaust from the mower comes up and doesn’t play a role in how it gets going. In the moment, I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was going about it the wrong way. He was just so proud to get it running that I didn’t want to tell him that he may need to buy his mom a new engine if he kept doing that because starting fluid is extremely flammable, and a muffler can get extremely hot after a short period of use.

The reality is, people don’t know what they don’t know and sometimes do things they think are necessary or helpful, but can turn into problems or be of no actual benefit. I see this all the time when it comes to retirement planning and living. People often prepare for it in ways that don’t always make sense, including just going through a series of motions of what other people have said or told them to do without really stopping to question it or ask for advice before they start it.

Unfortunately, most of what people have been told or trained to think about retirement won’t help them make a meaningful transition. In fact, it’s so far off that it can make things worse. Spraying starting fluid in the wrong spot on a $300 mower is a cute and funny mistake of little significance, however, preparing to start a multi-million dollar journey that could last 30-40 years the wrong way can be much more to recover from.

This is the primary reason why I have spent the last year developing a new assessment tool designed to quantify personal retirement readiness. The program is designed around the concept of retirement intelligence or retirement quotient (RQ) and is a framework for understanding an individual and not only appreciating their world, but also gaining insights from it in an effort to better prepare them for their retirement transition.

The goal is to provide insight and context for transitioning a client’s current thoughts, feelings and behaviors into their new retirement reality, while addressing any variations that may arise. This is done by engaging clients in a series of questions that looks at their knowledge about the transition (IQ), by understanding and managing new and competing thoughts and feelings about it (EQ), developing a new sense of identity, purpose and meaning (SQ), and by fostering a resilient mindset around aging, longevity and legacy (AQ).

That’s a fancy way of saying, it gets people thinking and talking about aspects of retirement they haven’t given much thought to and helps them develop realistic expectations and plans for retirement rather than making vague assumptions and feeling disappointed when they don’t come to fruition. While there are scientific components to it, it’s really about helping people avoid common traps and pitfalls and avoid wasting the first few years trying to figure it out on their own.

I think one of the most important aspects of retirement intelligence is the idea that there is no universal, or single best way to retire. In other words, we know that an introvert would define a successful life in retirement differently than an extrovert. Women retire differently than men and that solo-agers have different plans and goals than those with adult children and grandkids. Furthermore, some people enter retirement recently divorced, widowed or maybe as a caregiver. 

That makes it essential to value these differences and understand that any real breakthrough or aha moment for clients in the non-financial planning process won’t come from a series of questions or score. Instead that comes from conversations and discussions about them and how their personality, preferences and current behaviors will transfer over to retirement. I can’t overstate this need for conversation and discussion enough because when we started beta testing the program, the questionnaire had to be printed and physically taken by circling their answers and then emailing them back to me. In every single questionnaire that came back, people made handwritten notes about their answers.

Fact is, you can’t capture all of what someone is thinking or feeling with four or five response options or a scale of one to10. Reality is, until now, we haven’t had a tool that guided this discussion and presented opportunities to avoid spraying unnecessary starting fluid all over their retirement plans.

So far, we have learned a lot about people and this process that can be helpful for advisors to be aware of. First, just like my nephew, people don’t know what they don’t know. The last question on the assessment asks them “How well do you think you are prepared for the non-financial side of retirement?” with a scale of one to10. The average score is around six, with the most common answer being seven.

However, their cumulative RQ scores come in well below that point. While we use different scoring levels for the final score, applying the data to a scale of one to10, most people would be coming in at a four. Simply put, clients need more information, education, resources and tools around the more personal aspects of life after work.

Second, people have a lot of competing thoughts and feelings about life in retirement and don’t know how to sort them out. To be cliché, they can feel like they are stuck between a rock and a hard place or darned if they do and darned if they don’t. They want to retire, but also want to still work. They love their co-workers and would miss them, but not the new management team or ever-changing technology. They thought about volunteering but aren’t sure with who or how often. They have some general ideas and plans for retirement but they’re vague and unclear.

It's a mental tennis match that goes back and forth in their head, leaving them disillusioned and less confident in their decision or plan to retire. While figuring these competing situations out is very personal, much of it can be sorted out with some simple instruction and encouragement. Suggesting a client find two charitable organizations that they like to see what volunteer opportunities are available is an easy start that goes a long way to helping them fill their time and replace their identity. Handing them a list of the 10 most common goals people want to accomplish in the first 30 days of retirement shows them not only what others have done but gives them a sense that they can do it too.

While we continue to learn from the data, it has become evident that optimal retirement intelligence is characterized by a moderate to high level of curiosity, resilience, self-awareness, adaptability, reflectiveness, communicativeness and optimism. The issue is, we haven’t had a tool, process or trained experts to establish a baseline for it and a follow-up process to increase it.

Overall, the concept of retirement intelligence or RQ is expected to be a major disruption to the industry. On the one hand it is designed to help deepen client relationships as well as increase retirement satisfaction rates and outcomes. On the other hand, it will cause clients to start expecting more out of their advisors and asking questions like, “Do you talk about more than money, do you have any training around it and do you have a process that supports it?” For advisors who aren’t prepared to answer questions like that, it may be time to invest in some more starting fluid. 

Robert Laura is a best-selling author, nationally syndicated columnist and president of Wealth & Wellness Group. He is a seasoned conference speaker, corporate trainer and founder of The Certified Professional Retirement Coach Designation, which focuses on the non-financial aspects of life after work. He can be reached at [email protected].