Then I wrap up the conversation by saying, “The good news is, you have enough money to retire but it won’t necessarily help you with any of this other stuff.”

I don’t know that any advisor using an approach like this would end up with very many new clients, simply because everyone would be petrified to retire. It’s bad enough that much of traditional retirement planning uses fear to make people feel that they will be homeless and a burden to others if they don’t save a certain amount of money. So how do we raise awareness around the topics that nobody wants to talk about but can definitely show up in retirement? 

One of the things I have continually said is that we need to “vaccinate” clients for retirement. In other words, just as a flu shot injects a small amount of something negative into the body so that it begins to build up some defenses around it, we have to do the same thing with retirement planning. Insert some of these negative thoughts, feelings and situations that can come up so that when people get there, they can recognize them and fight back.

But saying we need to do this and actually doing it are two different things. It’s one reason I recently developed a new program called The Crossroads of Retirement.  For lack of a better term, it’s basically a retirement soap opera that’s designed to draw people in as I highlight issues that can disrupt a client’s retirement. The factors include the impact of a sudden retirement, the challenges clients face with adult children during retirement, the mental health issues like depression and addiction clients face, as well as the issues of fraud, cancer, ageism and more. 

I’m sharing this because this approach is completely out-of-the-box and critically important for us to start changing the retirement conversation. It’s an opportunity to bridge and blend financial conversations with the more personal aspects of life in retirement. It’s the element that has been missing from our industry as we look to fuse the hard side of retirement planning with the softer side. Furthermore, it helps us avoid pulling out that terrible brochure I mentioned earlier. 

As you will see, the series follows an uncanny retirement planner who uses his background as a psychologist to help clients navigate the aspects of retirement that few people ever talk about, let alone plan for. It’s designed to point out many of the fatal flaws of traditional retirement planning and to captivate clients with the emotional chaos that takes place in each episode. I liken the series to a car crash on the highway. As you drive by, you don’t want to look, but you can’t help wanting to slow down and see what is going on. 

Another major goal of the program was to highlight the significant role advisors play in clients’ lives. Therefore, it offers an insider’s look at the laundry list of things that clients can throw at us at any given time, and how they turn to us in some of the stickiest of situations. 

Something else that is crucial to the future of advisors came out of the launch. It isn’t enough to just come up with new and creative approaches. We also have to look at how we are delivering the content. When I developed the Crossroads of Retirement program, I decided to launch it as both an e-mail series as well as a podcast. It was my first foray into podcasting, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But I have been blown away by the results. By a 4-to-1 ratio, people are opting for the podcast over the written e-mail series.

Don’t get me wrong, I was aware of podcasts and their popularity, but that’s a major discrepancy I wasn’t prepared for. For advisors, what it illustrates is that people are not only looking for new ways to consume retirement information but that we must also use things like Adult Learning Theory to provide it.

As you may know, people tend to prefer one style of learning over another. Some are visual and prefer to learn by reading or watching videos. Others are auditory and prefer to learn by listening, and yet others are kinesthetic and prefer to learn by doing.