How I helped a client change their retirement plans

Retirement isn’t as linear as it once was. It’s very much more fluid than wandering through the door with a carriage clock, hanging up your briefcase and lighting a pipe.

And thank goodness for that!

But how do we plan for something so fluid and potentially changeable?

Last month I mentioned Carl Richards, Financial Planner and author of The Behaviour Gap, who says that straight-line planning, drawing a line between your current reality and your ultimate goal, just doesn’t work because you can never 100% predict what is coming over the hill.

And this month I can illustrate the alternative through a piece of planning I did with a client.

Helping a client to find what they – not their children – want for their future 

I have a client who lives in Gerards Cross in Buckinghamshire. Sadly she lost her husband in March. With a £1m house £2m in cash savings, she’s more than comfortable. But she’s now at a crossroads: what should she do with her life? 

Chatting to her over a couple of hours I divined that what she’d really like to do is move house.  It was clear she was really quite unhappy in her home; her husband had bought it because it ticked all the boxes. 

But if she did sell, where would she move to? All her friends live nearby, and those important networks that are so hard to establish. Just knowing the person who can fix the shower provides so much comfort for people of a certain age (or any age, come to think of it!).  

She could buy a second home though.  

But where? She wasn’t sure, but her children had all the answers 

They decided they’d quite like their mum to buy house in the Cotswolds; this would give them a lovely place to visit in the holidays with their children. They could put it in their names and start the inheritance planning process.  

I could see it featuring in an episode of the comedy series Motherland: of course it would be great for her children: a place for them to visit, beautiful holiday accommodation whenever they wanted with free babysitting by granny built in. 

But what about granny? 

I could tell she wasn’t enthused by the Cotswolds idea, but she couldn’t really come up with an argument that felt decisive enough, apart from ‘Who would cut the grass?’ 

I had to dig deeper. 

So I asked her ‘How would you feel about going back to same place every year? Let’s say you have 10 years left, do you want to spend them in Chipping Norton?’  

And this was the light-bulb moment 

She said no. She’d rather rent a house in a different part of the Mediterranean each year for 6 months and invite her children out there.  

And from this point, there was no stopping her. The floodgates opened: She wanted to spend her summers on the Greek Islands, the French Riviera, the Italian coast.  

This was much more exciting than cutting the grass in the Cotswolds. And how wonderful for her grandchildren – they’d get to see a different part of Europe each year. 

I could see the change in her instantly: she suddenly saw her retirement as something to enjoy rather than endure. 

No more being encouraged to go down a route that would be convenient for others. 

Since then, her thinking has moved on a stage further: she’s she is going for the 'shifting holiday home rental' plan, but she's also decided that actually she will move house too. 

Hello to a home she finally wants to live in. 

None of this was in her original plan, but all it took was a bit of deep thinking, permission to put herself first and the freedom to explore a no-holds-barred alternative. 

Giving clients the space to explore these things and seeing the realisation on their faces when they hit on something they didn’t realise they wanted and can have, is what makes this job so special for me, and so life-changing for them.