Top 5 Retirement Questions Most People Don’t Ask

Top 5 Retirement Questions Most People Don’t Ask

Yesterday, someone asked me how I decided to go into the financial business. They asked me if it was because I just love numbers? They were curious what the driving factor was for my career choice.

It’s interesting because I really wasn’t a huge fan of math – it wasn’t my first love in school. In fact, I hated algebra in school – I hated the problems, I hated the process – absolutely despised it.

However, if I had a word problem, I liked it. And I could get it right almost every time. The reason I liked the word problems was that they made feel like I was actually solving a problem for a reason. It just made more sense to me.

In a sense, what I do now as a financial advisor is a lot like solving a giant real world word problem. It’s really not just about the numbers – because there are so many other factors that go into financial planning and portfolio management. It’s not about having x number of dollars to retire, or even about amount of income. Those are just numbers on a page that don’t mean anything if we don’t have the why behind your objectives.

During our last Power Hour, we talked about five important questions for retirement planning questions that no one asks, I just kind of want to dive into those a little bit more.

For starters – what do you want to do and why and where do you want to live and why?

These are two things are very important when we’re going through retirement. It’s not just about telling you what income you need because if we don’t know what you really want to do and what you want your retirement to look like – then we’re back to just random numbers on a page that mean very little.

We have shared stories multiple times about other advisors who either told someone they couldn’t retire, or told someone they could retire without asking these very important questions. This can cause a tremendous amount of angst for the client and it can ultimately lead to the client not being able to sustain the retirement that they thought they had planned for.

The next three questions are important –  What do you want to do to stay busy in retirement? What do you want to learn or improve? And how do you want to make an impact on your community, whether that’s your physical community, the worldwide community, or for your family?

These are questions that go a little deeper and most people don’t consider them at all. We believe that to have a meaningful life it’s important that you have meaningful relationships. And meaningful work. I believe in what God said in Ephesians  –  we are God’s workmanship created for good works, which he created beforehand for us to do.

I think we get a lot of our value, worth, and significance, by the work we do. But what type of work do you want to do in your retirement? What do you want to continue whether you’re getting paid for it or not? But that’s a question that you need to ask if you want to have that meaningful retirement.

And again, what do you want to learn or improve? Maybe you want to learn something that you’ve never had the opportunity to, or work on a hobby that you’ve never been able to and maybe even turn that into a side business,? And what kind of impacts do you want to have?

If you don’t answer the last three questions, it doesn’t matter how financially secure you are, you’re not going to have a very meaningful retirement. Because if you don’t have meaningful relationships, you’re not making an impact on others, you don’t have meaningful work, you’re not going to feel like you have a meaningful life.

It’s not just about the numbers. It’s about more than math. So take some time and think about those questions. Whether you’re retired or you’re thinking ahead, what do you want to do?

We have a white paper this month about how to make sure a recession doesn’t rob your retirement years.  This month’s white paper will help you walk through some of those things as you’re going through even what you want to do in retirement, those different things to help you logically put some stuff down and make sure that while we can’t change what’s going on in the world around us, we can be sure that you have the financial confidence and security to enjoy retirement.

Make sure you tune in for our next Power Hour on Friday September 9^th.

If you’d like to schedule a personal one-on-one call with Michelle, click HERE to access Michelle’s calendar and schedule a day and time that is convenient for you.

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