Advisors want to “freeze time” rather than retire
Casey Jorgensen at Dynasty Financial found the narrative of the impending “silver tsunami” of advisor retirements to be compelling enough that she asserted herself at the forefront of helping advisors transition into their next chapter.
What she didn’t anticipate, however, was the sheer resistance from advisors to embrace their retirement.
“It’s a concept so fundamental to our industry, yet so ironically overlooked by its very practitioners,” she says. “Advisors don’t really have an interest in retiring. They’ll talk about it and they know they have to plan for it. But what they really want to do is freeze time and die with their bootstraps on until the last client leaves.”
The reasons for this are two-fold, says the head of Dynasty’s Institute for Adaptive Leadership (DIAL). For one, advisors aren’t interested because they enjoy the noble profession of helping clients and watching the recurring revenue. Boomers are also redefining what it means to retire by not fully retiring.
“They are a generation that enjoys being on the cutting edge. They like learning new technology, learning new things, and I think there’s this great fear that if they do retire, they become irrelevant,” she says. “The worst-case scenario is they can’t actually afford to retire.”
But as she says, it’s not always in the best interest of the clients – or the firm.
“It’s actually fiduciary duty,” Jorgensen says. “I would anticipate that the SEC is going to crack down on this, and make a mandatory retirement age.”
One of the biggest challenges advisors face themselves is planning for that next chapter. Oftentimes, advisors have nothing to retire to because they haven’t thought enough about it, she noted. This is why she helps retiring advisors and
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