Have you ever come across someone whose professional and personal life are contradictory? Think of a carpenter whose house remains under constant construction, the family therapist who struggles to make family time, the chef who prefers to order out, or the retirement planner who can’t get their arms around actually retiring.

On the surface, the disconnect between work life and home life is easy to understand. The last thing many people want to do when they get home is more of their work. However, the situation is compounded for financial professionals because of the multitude of emotional factors they face in transitioning both their business and themselves.

Retirement by itself is a very emotionally charged topic because of the minefield of change it ushers in, but add in the idea of selling your client and staff relationships that you’ve built and nurtured for years and you have the perfect recipe for procrastination. It’s no wonder that the average age of advisors continues to climb as the barriers to exit remain high.

My big epiphany came when I was presenting at a national advisor conference on the psychology of retirement and started taking questions from the audience. Initially, I expected to get the routine questions about client situations but instead they were primarily personal retirement questions from the planners. Things like how to talk about retirement with their spouse, losing their work identity and replacing the “high” one gets from helping people achieve their financial goals.

I had taken for granted, that many financial professionals are in fact, just that: financial professionals whose primary role was to help make sure their clients didn’t run out of money. They hadn’t made the switch to helping people look and plan beyond the dollars and cents primarily because very few firms encourage this type of training and even fewer people can provide it.

However, now that they are facing their own retirement, this new set of factors has emerged and they are quickly realizing that running out of money pales in comparison to running out of family, friends, good health and time. Over the last couple years, I have not only continued to have similar conversations with planners but also began to document key reasons why advisors struggle and what they can do about it. Here are my top three reasons:

1. Emotional voids. To start, we are trusted, go-to people. Clients rely heavily on us for our expertise, knowledge and experience. That’s a triple threat, sort of like the high-profile celebrity who can sing, dance and act. Our roles and client interactions keep us relevant, connected and highly sought-after. All prized things that we have worked hard to achieve and won’t easily be replaced with more rounds of golf or boat rides with the grandkids.

Thus, the transition creates an emotional void whose depth and complexity are not only hard to fill but can be exacerbated by the concept of “enmeshment.” Long story short, when someone is enmeshed in their work, they overidentify with it and use it to meet most of their psychological needs. As a result, they haven’t developed much of an independent sense of self outside of their profession and are at risk of feeling lost, purposeless and out of sorts when they exit the field. This can lead to regret and isolation until they find ways to get those same psychological needs met.

The tricky part with enmeshment or this high level of attachment is that it can be highly valued in the workplace because feeling deeply connected to your work produces job satisfaction and meaning as well as motivation to be more and do more. Those are all great things for business goals and bottom lines, but not so good when it’s no longer there. The key thing for advisors to know is that falling in love with your work comes with a big price tag. It can’t love you back and can make for a long and difficult break up if you don’t have other sources of identity.

2. Sacred cows. Many people, including financial professionals see retirement as this sacred-cow-like phase of life that is filled with more time, freedom and less stress. It’s a time of life where things get better simply because you’re not working. But nothing could be further from the truth. In other words, most people including advisors approach retirement with these Pollyanna views along with some generic or vague ideas about what they think or hope it will look and feel like, but haven’t really taken the time to critically question any of these factors.

This point is important because I find many financial professionals don’t put as much value on the soft or mental/emotional side of the equation when compared to the financial or hard side, because they haven’t looked deeply into it. They just assume somehow it will work itself out.

That is until they get there and suddenly realize there’s more to the story than money. I think it’s interesting that within our industry you see arguments for and against the 4% rule and the 60-40 portfolio, for example, but very few debates around the psychology of retirement. In other words, we need more critical thinking from our industry on the topic because it allows us to not only create new ideas, beliefs and behaviors around the transition but also helps us pinpoint the values and virtues we want to live out in retirement. That’s a point I don’t want advisors to miss because there is no single or universal definition of a successful retirement, making it necessary for everyone, including financial professionals to develop their own very personal vision and approach.

At a recent conference, I offered the attendees an opportunity to challenge the status quo of traditional retirement by pondering these questions:
• Why do we still have retirement ages?
• Who does retirement help and hurt?
• What would be different if we didn’t have retirement?
• What harsh truths about it do we as a society prefer to ignore?
• What does it mean to live a good life in retirement?
• What do we lose or give up in order to reach retirement?
• Where does a person’s self-worth come from in retirement?
• By what standards do you judge yourself and how will that change in retirement?
• What is the biggest waste of retirement?
• Does everyone have the same rights in retirement?

While these are just a few of the many questions I have stockpiled for financial and other professionals to consider before retirement, the goal here is to start thinking about factors that go beyond the dollars and cents of retirement.

3. Clients as friends. Research suggests that one of the key factors that plays an important role in the retirement transition is tied to a person’s social network. Now, we all know about the challenges that clients have staying connected to co-workers when they leave the workplace. They have the best intentions of doing so, but those relationships fade because they are no longer connected by work. Advisors face an even bigger hurdle because our business is highly social and we consider many of our clients as friends.

Advisors who are usually very good at calculating things, haven’t adjusted or prepared for the loss of these relationships over time. Similar to other people in the workplace, when there is no longer that essential connector and your client/friends are getting advice and market insights from someone else, your social network can begin to shrink very quickly. Which is why it’s so essential for advisors on the verge of retirement to start thinking more about the relationships that are important to them and how they hope to keep or strengthen them during the transition.

As you can see, the culmination of these factors can make it challenging for advisors to not only make the decision to retire, but to also pull the cord and make it happen. It’s a complex situation with a number of layers and factors to consider, which is why it may make sense to add a retirement coach, or someone trained in the non-financial factors to your stable of professionals helping you make the transition.  

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].