At a glance
- The second pattern the coach describes is a client who retires on paper and re-engages with work within a year.
- For advisors, the gap appears as a client who keeps taking on new projects after hitting the number.
- The column says the conversation can stay inside an advisor's scope: map what a Tuesday actually looks like six months into retirement.
A client who keeps delaying the retirement date the plan was built around may have settled the money question but not the identity one, a retirement coach wrote in an InvestmentNews column. The second pattern the coach describes is a client who retires on paper and re-engages with work within a year.
For advisors, the gap appears as a client who keeps taking on new projects after hitting the number. A client who talks about retirement in financial terms only, with no answer when asked what a normal Wednesday will look like, is another marker the column names, and so is a spouse or partner already imagining a shared next chapter the client has not agreed to.
The column says the conversation can stay inside an advisor's scope: map what a Tuesday actually looks like six months into retirement. It also suggests asking which work relationships carry over and which do not, and what "enough" means once the number is no longer the open question.
The column singles out Gen X clients as the first cohort designing retirement without a generational template to follow. It describes them as skeptical of anyone implying they need a script handed to them, which the coach says changes what a useful conversation sounds like.
Reported by The Advisor's Note desk from InvestmentNews. Published . Corrections