Fifteen retirement readiness tasks for clients

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

In May, U.S. insurer Met Life issued a 28 page report, quan­ti­fy­ing where Amer­i­cans stand in terms of their prepa­ra­tion for retirement.

This readi­ness index mea­sures fif­teen tasks — attached to the report is a ques­tion­naire that advi­sors can take clients through to bench­mark where clients stand on each task and iden­tify areas to work on.

The fif­teen tasks for retire­ment readiness

The fif­teen tasks fall into five areas:

Activ­i­ties related to income and benefits.

This includes assess­ing when full time retire­ment will be finan­cially fea­si­ble, eval­u­at­ing the impact of changes in the econ­omy on pen­sions, invest­ments and retire­ment ben­e­fits and deter­min­ing what has to be done to receive the com­pany and Gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits that clients are enti­tled to.

Work related tasks

This makes up five of the fif­teen things to do.

These include decid­ing whether to fully retire or work part-time, iden­ti­fy­ing the options for full time or part time work in retire­ment, fig­ur­ing out if skills can be eas­ily trans­ferred to part-time work and explor­ing alter­nate career or part time oppor­tu­ni­ties in retirement.

Leisure related activities

Leisure related tasks include things like deter­min­ing the bal­ance between work and leisure in retire­ment and iden­ti­fy­ing per­sonal goals in retirement.

Rela­tion­ship tasks

Rela­tion­ship tasks to pre­pare for retire­ment cap­ture think­ing through the impact of retire­ment on rela­tion­ships with a spouse, fam­ily and friends and also con­sid­er­ing the effect on rela­tion­ships with co-workers.

Plan­ning for retirement

This includes deter­min­ing what it will take to have a sat­is­fy­ing retire­ment, iden­ti­fy­ing alter­nate plans should there be an unex­pected set­back related to health or finan­cial issues and also eval­u­at­ing whether retire­ment plans meet the demands of poten­tial changes.

Con­clu­sions on retire­ment readiness

This report reached a num­ber of gen­eral conclusions.

First, get­ting ready to retire is more com­pli­cated than just hav­ing enough money — there are many dimen­sions to a sat­is­fy­ing retirement.

In fact, the report points out that exist­ing retirees have pro­vided a road map to what has to hap­pen to max­i­mize the odds of a sat­is­fy­ing and ful­fill­ing retirement.

And sec­ond, com­plet­ing these tasks doesn’t mean that some­one should retire — but it does mean they can retire, they’re ready to retire.

The cur­rent think­ing on the tim­ing of retirement

Amer­i­cans are about evenly split on when they plan to retire — about half plan to retire at the age they’d been plan­ning to a cou­ple of years ago, the other half say they plan to work past the date they’d planned to.

Exist­ing retirees

About 64% of exist­ing retirees say they retired ear­lier than they’d expected, 33% retired when they’d expected to and only 3% said they’d retired later than expected.

The sur­vey didn’t ask if that early retire­ment was vol­un­tary — in all like­li­hood there were some cases in which com­pa­nies made the deci­sion for these early retirees.

Peo­ple feel­ing that they can retire on target

Peo­ple who say they can retire when they’d planned to were more likely to have estab­lished per­sonal goals. Estab­lish­ing those goals and then fol­low­ing through on them appears to focus peo­ple on the impor­tant activ­i­ties that will keep them on track.

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Tags: Alternate Plans, Benchmark, Co Workers, Compendium, Family And Friends, Government Benefits, Insurer, Opportunities In Retirement, Part Time Work, Pensions Investments, Personal Goals, Planning For Retirement, Planning Retirement, Questionnaire, Retirement Benefits, Retirement Plans, Retirement Readiness, Setback, Target, Time Opportunities
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2010 National Survey of Canadian Financial Advisors

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

2010 Advi­sor Surveys

Open March 15, 2010 to April 15, 2010

To Fee or Not to Fee is launch­ing its sec­ond annual national sur­vey of Cana­dian fee finan­cial advisors.

The sur­vey is open to all finan­cial advi­sors, no mat­ter what their level of fee income. We have also added a sec­ond sur­vey this year for the commission-based advisor.

Because the sur­vey results will be com­piled and sent to all the par­tic­i­pants, there are sev­eral ben­e­fits to advi­sors for participating:

•  Help elim­i­nate the myths and mis­un­der­stand­ings of the fee vs. com­mis­sion mod­els.
•  Pro­vide pric­ing guide­lines.
•  Under­stand the tran­si­tion process.

“The fee advi­sor mar­ket is fas­ci­nat­ing, but quite con­fus­ing and filled with inac­cu­rate data,” accord­ing to Marc Lam­on­tagne, founder and work­shop leader. “We think advi­sors will ben­e­fit from tak­ing the sur­vey because it will prompt some thought­ful con­sid­er­a­tion of their prac­tice and give them a fee-model benchmark.”

To Fee or Not to Fee is an advi­sor train­ing com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in the tran­si­tion to the fee model. Lam­on­tagne will also present the sur­vey results at the 2010 CIFPs con­fer­ence in Nia­gara Falls from June 13 to 16, 2010.

Please con­tact Marc Lam­on­tagne, CFP, R.F.P., FMA, at (613) 240‑8308 or marc@tofeeornottofee.com if you have any ques­tions or com­ments.

Please click on the appro­pri­ate sur­vey choice:

2010 Fee Advi­sor Sur­vey Click here to take survey

2010 Com­mis­sion Advi­sor Sur­vey Click here to take survey

More from Marc Lam­on­tagne — Ideas from the 2009 CIFPS Con­fer­ence — Video Inter­view from IE Television:

Over­com­ing three obsta­cles to fee-based busi­ness

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Tags: Advisor Training, Benchmark, Canadian Financial Advisors, Cfp, Financial Advisor, Fma, Inaccurate Data, Misunderstandings, Models, Myths, National Survey, Niagara Falls, Obstacles, Participants, Survey Results, Surveys, Television, Thoughtful Consideration, Transition, Video Interview, Workshop Leader
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