How To Take A Client’s Retirement To The Moon – Financial Advisor Magazine
Retirement is like space travel. Both are long journeys—or, at least, the latter potentially can be—but it’s easy to get off course along the way.
It’s a colorful analogy that was posited by Ken Dychtwald during the opening session at today’s “Next Chapter—ReThinking Retirement” virtual conference hosted by Financial Advisor. Dychtwald is a gerontologist, best-selling author of 18 books on aging-related issues, and founder and CEO of Age Wave, a think tank and consultancy focused on various issue pertaining to global aging and rising longevity.
And as one who’s long espoused new ways of thinking about an old issue like aging, and whose recent book is called “Radical Curiosity: One Man’s Search for Cosmic Magic and a Purposeful Life,” perhaps it’s not surprising that Dychtwald lumped space travel and retirement planning into the same sentence.
“If you’re helping people plan for their future, you need to keep the Apollo lesson in mind,” he said. “The Apollo 11 mission was the most planned mission in the history of the world, yet 90% of the time it was off course. The project was one of continual course correcting.”
His point was that financial advisors need to be more holistic, forward-thinking and engaged with clients when it comes to helping retirees keep their financial plans on track as they go through the decumulation period of their lives.
Dychtwald’s overall thesis is that the concept of retirement is entering a new frontier and is in the middle of what he called a “true transformation” consisting of three drivers.
“One, we have a whole new generation of people reaching retirement, and they’re far more likely to want to have a more diverse, creative, imaginative, alive, vital and interesting version of retirement than than their moms and dads and grandparents could have imagined,” he said.
Second, he noted, retirement is no longer the short-term holding tank between the end of one’s working years and the end of their life. That was more or less the case when Social Security was enacted in 1935, but as longevity has increased so too has the need for a more thoughtful approach to both preparing for—and maintaining—longer retirements.
“Today, people are looking at a whole new chapter in life that could last 20 or 30 years,” Dychtwald said.
And that leads to the third driver. “Boomers are a large population and won’t be benefitted by either employer pensions or certainty about government safety nets,” he said. “So a lot more of the responsibility for funding that longer life, filled with those new aspirations, will fall on those individuals. That calls for an entirely new set of ideas, language and financial support and guidance for the tens of millions who are living through this stage of life.”
