• Sensing that they may be pushing family and friends away because they worry and complain all the time.

  • Feeling judged and less confident because they can’t drop the extra weight they put on, despite their best efforts.

  • Cracking that beer, bottle of wine or cocktail at noon or earlier because it’s the only thing that cheers them up and helps them get through days when no one calls or stops by.

  • Feeling socially awkward, because they don’t fit in at the senior center or with friends who are still working.

  • Feeling isolated because of their declining hearing or vision which limits their ability to connect with others.

It’s a difficult list to read and one that no advisor wants to sit down with a client and say, “Let’s go over the things that could cause you the most stress and anxiety in retirement.” Yet, if clients aren’t made aware of the things that can potentially derail their plans, and offered resources to address them, their transition may take longer and have more downs than ups. 

A major issue is that two of the key decision factors for making the transition have little to do with a client’s ability to adapt. While there is no doubt finances play a key role in a successful shift, saving a certain amount of money or reaching a certain age offer little help in rewiring someone after 30-40 years of habitual thoughts, patterns and interactions. Just as western medicine is criticized for treating symptoms with expensive medications instead of the causes, expensive financial plans filled with charts and graphs mask the real work that needs to be done. 

The transition is further complicated by an interesting paradox: retirement takes work. It’s a curious contradiction for two reasons.  First, most clients assume they are leaving work behind once they officially retire. Second, and more importantly, the work that clients often need to perform requires a different set of skills and abilities than those they used to get to this point in life.

For example, retirement’s workload can include developing new ways to measure personal success. While working, a client’s pay, title and peer reviews all provided clues as to where they were and how well they were doing. In retirement, there are no such reviews, pay raises or fancy titles to help people gauge how well they are doing, and it’s not natural to know how to build a new framework to work with.

Other retirement work-related skills and tasks can include:

  • Learning how to say “No” to adult children

  • Stopping a sibling from sabotaging an aging parent’s care

  • Developing a schedule that gets you out of the house and learning new things and meeting new people