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Thursday, January 5, 2012

Helping Clients Thrive in Retirement

Critical Fact #1: Clients are demanding more and are starving for a trusted advisor

• Clients often fear retirement and will bond to a trusted source of guidance and advice
• What keeps clients up at night?
o Managing their money
o Loss of employment and related status
o Living with purpose after retirement
o Fear of change and fading into the woodwork due to lack of social connections

Critical Fact #2: Your clients want to thrive in retirement

With the retirement of hundreds of thousands, as a financial advisor, you have a unique opportunity to extend and enhance your reputation as a trusted source of guidance and counsel. As a trusted advisor who recognizes your clients’ fears and engages expertise to help manage the fears, you will have a dramatically positive impact on the quality of retirement for your clients and their families.

Critical Action #1: What you need to do

• You need to fully understand the retirement concerns of Boomers (45+). Read books, articles, on-line resources about retirement. Talk to successfully retired people about what makes for a happy, productive retirement. Find out from clients and others what their retirement concerns really are.
• Enhance and grow your practice by hosting retirement planning workshops and events. Clients love receiving the information especially if profound insights, true-to-life stories and self-completing exercises are included. Encourage your clients to bring friends and colleagues – a great resource for referrals.
• Integrate retirement life planning into your client conversations. As one highly successful advisor said to me. “With my clients, we rarely talk about money and more often discuss family and the future. We regularly review their holistic retirement plan as to what’s working, what’s not working as well as they would like and I ask ‘how can I help?’

The Payoff for Clients:


• Sharpened understanding of their retirement needs and interests before crisis occurs.
• Creation of a fully integrated retirement life plan to protect their time and money after work.
• Discovery of opportunities that add excitement and heightened personal fulfillment.
• Living and loving retirement to its fullest!

The Payoff for You as their Trusted Advisor:

• Be recognized and rapidly referred as a trusted advisor who makes things happen.
• Retain clients forever, and build the bridge to their kids and families.
• You will love what you do even more than you do now.
• You will help more people, make more money and solidify your practice.

Here are comments made by satisfied clients:

“We just love Jim. It is so refreshing working with an advisor who just doesn’t focus on the financial side but rather all aspects of retirement.”

“Our advisor invited my wife and I to a retirement planning workshop. We found the discussions, lecturettes, brainstorming and case studies were great for expanding our planning.”


“Sharon is different from most advisors. She recognizes retirement is much more than the money! It’s what to do with time 24/7, it’s keeping healthy in body, soul and mind, it’s enhancing relationships with spouse/partner, family and friends, it’s living retirement to its fullest!”

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Richard (Rick) Atkinson, Founder and President of RA Retirement Advisors, is an expert in pre-retirement planning. He is author of the best-selling book, Don’t Just Retire – Live It, Love It! Rick facilitates workshops for clients of advisors and others. He is available for speaking engagements. www.dontjustretire.com. Twitter: @dontjustretire.