The focus of this post is suggest a couple of ways to minimize the stress associated with money and retirement. I want you to think about how age can change your pre-conceived notions about retirement.

Some of you have heard me describe the three stages of life:
The first is when we are young and wholly dependent on our parents for our survival.
The second is when we transition to the real world and become dependent on ourselves for our survival.
The third is when we transition from “working for money” to where “money is working for us.” This is otherwise known as “retirement.”

We’ve all heard the birthday and age clichés: “It’s just a number;” “My age doesn’t define me;” “I don’t feel old…”. Whether you believe those old saws or not, numbers do create stereotypical pictures and assumptions about when a person can retire. In their own mind, it’s a question of whether or not they have enough money.

The answer can be major stress factor for people whose age is approaching the socially acceptable time to “retire”. The notion of “money working for us” is a fundamental shift away from our thought patterns during our working lives. We typically live without regard to our age when it comes to living a full and uninhibited life before we retire, yet allow arbitrary retirement calculations and other uncontrollable factors to define and sometimes inhibit our lives in retirement.

I make my living selling advice and running retirement calculations for clients. This post explores three simple ideas that will hopefully reduce your retirement planning stress and help you shift away from a numbers-based approach to more of a total wellness approach.

If Age Doesn’t Define You, Why Does Money?

From a financial planning perspective, it’s helpful to realize that just as age doesn’t define a person neither will their level of savings and investments define their retirement. Up to now, nothing a financial advisor has ever told you or sold you gets mentioned at your funeral. I’ve been to my share of funerals, and I’ve never heard an advisor’s name mentioned during the service. There may be a nice bouquet of flowers (in an attempt to convince the beneficiaries to keep those funds with their company) but financial matters are never included as part of how a person wants to be remembered.

The significance of this is for me is to help people move away from defining their retirement only in terms of dollars and cents (numbers) and focus instead on what they want to do with their other assets such as their time, energy, knowledge or wisdom when their working days are over. The attempt is to change the retirement planning framework to include these other, equally critical, aspects of retirement. The process becomes a more enjoyable and flexible one instead of being driven by the fear, shame, or guilt that numbers too often engender.

Vacationing and Marriage

This leads to another strategy for reducing retirement planning stress: replace guilt and shame with positive real-life examples and experiences that shed light on what retirement planning and retirement itself can reflect. Currently, there’s a guilt / shame tactic based on “people spend more time planning a two week vacation that they do their retirement.” Well, no kidding! Does this really surprise you? Said in the wrong way, though, it’s easy to make someone feel bad about their planning or saving efforts. Unfortunately, this kind of attitude has become synonymous with our industry. It puts clients on guard and causes stress and anxiety when working with an advisor.

In fact, retirement and financial planning have nothing to do with vacation planning and should never be compared to it. Instead, consider this wedding day analogy to change perceptions about retirement. Imagine that if, on your wedding day, your entire married life had to be all planned out before you said “I do.” How would that be going for you right now? We know that, just like a marriage, retirement is a journey, during which good and bad things will happen.

And just as you have to make adjustments and changes throughout married life, you’ll likely have to make sacrifices and changes during retirement. We all know that retirement can change in an instant, whether it’s a market bubble bursting or something more personal such as a major medical incident, or a life ending scenario. The point is no one has to have everything figured out by the time they retire. All that’s needed is a commitment to a planning process that, like life itself, remains flexible.

Best Retirement Plan Ever

A good advisor can also help clients reduce financial stress by introducing humorous stories and anecdotes into the process. There is a story, perhaps an urban legend, about England’s Bristol Zoo, where there is a parking lot for 150 cars and 8 buses. For 25 years, its parking fees were managed by a very pleasant attendant. The fees for cars were $2.25 and $11.00 for buses.

One day, after 25 solid years of never missing a day of work, the attendant didn’t show up. So the zoo management called the city council and asked them to send them another parking agent. The council did some research and replied that the parking lot was the zoo’s responsibility. The zoo advised the council that the attendant was a city employee. The council responded that the zoo lot attendant had never been on the city payroll.

Meanwhile, sitting somewhere along the coast of Spain, in a beautiful villa, is a man who’d apparently had a ticket machine installed completely on his own and then had simply begun to show up every day, collecting the parking fees, estimated at about $900, for 25 years. Assuming seven days a week, this amounts to approximately $11 million US dollars… and no one even knows his name.

While I can’t endorse the strategy, I can endorse the smiles and it creates. Bottom line? Numbers can cause stress and dilute the retirement planning process as well as the quality of retirement life. By moving away from a dollars-and-cents only approach, and focus on how you want to spend your time and energy during retirement, you’ll hopefully find the best time to retire and enjoy whatever days you have left with your family and loved ones.

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