When Can I Retire? The Question Underneath the Question
Last week I helped lead a training for a group of financial planners learning the EVOKE process, the framework George Kinder built and teaches through the Kinder Institute of Life Planning. I've been on every side of that room by now, first as a student, then as the client sitting in the chair, and now as a trainer. Throughout last week, I kept coming back to one of the deepest learnings of the training: what happens when someone asks you a question, rather than rushing in with a fix. You can watch the whole shape of a conversation change. Though it sounds simple, it’s the essence of what we spend the week teaching advisors to do, and it's the same thing we do at Mana when we sit down with somebody. As a financial life planner, I see people come into a meeting talking about their savings rate and their timeline, and twenty minutes later they're talking about a parent who died before they got around to saying the thing, or a version of their life they set aside in their twenties and have been circling ever since.
I came home thinking about our own clients and prospective clients, and about how many of them are postponing the parts of life they need most, and how often that postponement has a number attached to it.
What people ask financial planners
Almost every first conversation opens with a version of the same question: How fast can I retire? How much do I need before I can step back? What happens after the exit? Those are fair questions, and running those numbers is a big part of what we do. But when we sit with the question long enough, and I mean sit with it rather than answer it, it usually turns out to be standing in for a different one, which is closer to: when do I get to have my life?
What we see when the date shows up
The pattern goes something like this: Somebody comes to us in the run-up to something big; a sale, an IPO, a retirement date they've been counting toward for a decade. Every part of their financial life has been targeting this event. Somewhere in the work, something else surfaces. There's a whole category of things sitting in a waiting room: the relationship they want and haven't made room for, the body they keep meaning to get back to, the friendships that have thinned out, and/or their own needs. All of it is scheduled for after, because after is when there will finally be time and energy and attention to give it.
Then the date arrives. The money lands, sometimes more of it than the plan showed. And, curiously, their life doesn't change. The pace holds, the appetite for the next thing doesn't switch off because a balance went up, and everything in the waiting room is still in the waiting room. The only thing that's different is that there's no date left to blame it on.
We've watched versions of this more times than I'd like:
A client who organized a decade around an exit, got it, and was back at the desk that Monday with a new target.
A client who has been told the payout is three years away for years running, and has been turning down things they wanted the whole time because the timing wasn't right yet.
A client who finally took the trip and spent most of it distracted and on their email.
This is a large part of why our process at Mana looks the way it does. Deferral isn't something an advisor can diagnose on a client's behalf, and pointing at it from the outside doesn’t do much, even when it seems obvious. What moves people is hearing themselves describe the life they want and noticing how long it's been sitting on hold, so that's where we start. Sometimes it happens in a first meeting and sometimes it takes years. We've stopped trying to speed that up, and we keep asking.
Why that financial plan sits in a drawer collecting dust
My friend Scott Frank, who was the lead trainer of our group last week, wrote something recently that stuck with me. He uses Jonathan Haidt's image of the rider and the elephant, where the rider is the analytical mind that follows logic and agrees to plans, and the elephant is everything underneath. Ultimately, it's the elephant that decides where the two of them actually go. The elephant learned what it knows early, through feeling and experience rather than argument, which is why a beautifully built projection so rarely changes what anybody does.
Financial services is an information business. We explain, we model, we lay out the options with supporting data, and all of that lands with the rider. Meanwhile the elephant is carrying something like "rest has to be earned" or "more is always safer," picked up at nine years old watching a parent, and no spreadsheet has ever talked it out of that. If you've taken home a thorough financial plan and let it sit unopened, that's why.
What we ask instead
Financial Life Design is our answer to this. Before we ask for a statement, we ask about life, and then we listen for longer than most people are expecting us to.
What comes up are what we call the essential elements, and they're usually plainer than people expect: time with the people they love, room to make something, mornings that belong to them, work that doesn't demand an endless climb, being known by somebody. What I notice almost every time is that those things don't require a date, and they rarely require the whole number. People attach them to the number because the number feels reachable and the change itself feels dangerous, and the exit becomes the story we tell ourselves about when we're finally allowed.
Starting now, on purpose
This is where the numbers do their part. Pulling something out of year seven and into this year has a price, and our job is to tell you what it is. That usually means looking at your cash flow, your tax bill, what to do with a concentrated stock position, and what the change does to your balance thirty years from now.
So we model it. Sometimes it turns out you can do more, sooner than you thought, and it's a relief to see that on the page. Sometimes it turns out you can have most of what you want now if you're willing to have somewhat less later, and that's a decision worth making on purpose rather than by default.
For our clients, starting now has looked like a four-day week that cost less than anybody expected once we ran it, a month worked from somewhere else, the assistant they'd been refusing to pay for, a cap on how many deals they'd take in a year, and a standing Thursday block for the person they keep meaning to connect with. None of that required a liquidity event.
The question worth asking
If the date you're working toward showed up tomorrow, what would you do differently the following Monday?
If that list is long, it's worth looking at now, because the date doesn't give you a different life when you get there. The habits you have today are the ones you'll bring with you, and ten years of putting something off…is good practice at putting it off. I've sat with people who reached the number, and then some, and found that the thing they wanted most had gotten further away while they were getting to the number.
Money is a tool and living a beautiful life is the point. That life tends to be made up of the school pickups, the hour with the guitar, and uninterrupted dinners with your person; none of it is waiting on a date. We'd rather help you build the life while you're building the money, instead of one after the other.
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The situations described here are patterns drawn from years of client work and don't describe any individual client.
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Stephanie Bucko and Cristina Livadary are fee-only financial planners based in Los Angeles, California. Stephanie is the Chief Investment Officer and Cristina is the Chief Executive Officer at Mana Financial Life Design (FLD). Mana FLD provides comprehensive financial planning and investment management services to help clients grow and protect their wealth throughout life’s journey. Mana FLD specializes in advising ambitious professionals who seek financial knowledge and want to implement creative budgeting, savings, proactive planning and powerful investment strategies. As fee-only fiduciaries and independent financial advisors, Stephanie and Cristina never receive commission of any kind. Stephanie and Cristina are legally bound by their certifications to provide unbiased and trustworthy financial advice.