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Tips To Attract Soon-To-Be Retirees
Clients can slip through your fingers if you miss their biggest worries.
By Jack Sharry
THE OLDEST MEMBERS OF GEN X TURN 60 this year. They’ re the vanguard of a generation that Goldman Sachs called“ the 401( k) experiment.” Among boomers,“ peak 65” began last year, with more people turning 65 years old than ever before or since in history.
There are millions of people with retirement in their periscopes, and it’ s no secret they need financial planning and advice for their household holdings, particularly when it comes to the effects of taxes on their savings and investments.
The biggest expense for households earning more than $ 200,000 is taxes, according to the U. S. Department of Labor’ s 2021“ Consumer Expenditure Survey.” But only three in 10 Americans have a plan for minimizing the effect of taxes on their retirement income, according to Northwestern Mutual’ s 2024“ Planning & Progress Study.”
One way of handling this is by managing all the portfolios and accounts in a household taken together, what has been referred to as the“ unified managed household” approach. This allows advisors to take into account the tax effect on long-term investing so their clients have more money in retirement and the potential to pass it along to heirs and charitable beneficiaries.
Recently, this approach has come into stark relief for me and my wife, as we embarked on a too-long-delayed financial planning process and switched financial advisors and firms. Looking for a new one, we did an extensive interview and selection process, since I was informed by many years of working in the industry and advocating for the household approach. We looked for an advisor team to do several things:
1. Listen and get to know us. Who’ s in our family? Do they need our support now? Later? What are our priorities in retirement? Where will we live? Do we have charitable interests? The team we chose would then need to create a financial plan that pointedly addresses what we’ ve said. Aging expert Ken Dychtwald has wise words on this facet of financial planning and advice: that retirement is no longer viewed as a onetime event but a series of them.
2. Discuss costs. I was clear with the teams we interviewed: We are willing to pay for service, but we don’ t want to pay excessive costs for actively managed investments. Exchange-traded funds and model portfolios work fine. Morningstar agrees, saying that custom model portfolio assets had grown to more than $ 125 billion as of September 30, 2024, up almost 50 % from June 30, 2023.
3. Talk about consolidating accounts. We also asked the candidate advisors to show us how consolidating accounts with them would help us avoid running up a tax bill. I asked the candidate advisors questions about how and if they could incorporate all
48 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | MAY 2025 WWW. FA-MAG. COM