“Relational health is a key differentiator for us as advisors,” Courtney Pullen said at the outset of his presentation at the Retirement & Longevity Summit in San Diego on Monday afternoon.
Pullen, President of the Pullen Consulting Group, and author of Intentional Wealth noted that “retirement brings change, lots of change.” Planners may be well-versed in the financial aspects, but what about the human side?
He added that going from full-time work to retirement can create personal and family challenges. Advisors need awareness and skills to help clients transition, and Pullen offered insight into the human side of retirement.
“My background is working with wealthy families, so that’s my context that I bring to it,” he said in a pre-session interview. “What I’m talking about won’t be pertinent for the run-of-the-mill RIA who works with clients who have a few hundred thousand dollars. But if you get into the $10 million, $50 million, $100 million range, the complexity increases significantly.”
He then “unpacked” the word longevity and what it means today.
“Thirty years ago, we looked at retirement very differently,” Pullen explained. “We retired at 62.5 years old, and about a year later, most men died. The whole framework around retirement has shifted. The question really is much more about the issue of longevity. I define longevity here as a balance of life span, meaning living longer, and healthspan, meaning living better. We need to be speaking with our clients beyond the numbers about what they see in the longevity equation.”
Dilemma of wealth
Next, it’s the “dilemma of wealth.” The families he works with are conscious of the advantages, privileges, and opportunities wealth brings, but also a huge responsibility and often a lot of isolation.
He related a client case in which an early investor and employee in a company that sold is now worth $500 million. He and his wife moved to another state to reduce their tax profile.
“I walked into their house a couple of weeks ago, and it was a beautiful home, but it was just upper-middle-class and very sparsely furnished,” he said. “One of the reasons why was that their liquidity event happened 18 months ago, and neither one of them have told their friends. They live this lifestyle as if nothing had changed because they didn’t want their relationships to change. They’re embarrassed by it. It’s an extreme example but not an uncommon example. We need to be talking to families beyond just the financial capital and talking with them about their human and relational capital.”
It’s getting the conversation started, he concluded, and then listening.
“Advisors we are all surrounded by have this amazing technical expertise, but they’re not asking the questions about this that need to be asked.”
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.
