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].