Why You Should Ditch Your Retirement Plan

Last week, CNBC featured The Financial Crossroads “Fulfillment Planning” concept in a new network feature on retirement planning. I had the opportunity to give a few tips on the concept, and my friend, Greg Conderacci, joined me to discuss how he is living out his own Fulfillment Plan. Greg left the corporate realm as the Director of Marketing for Alex. Brown to live out his personal purpose and passions as a marketing consultant, college instructor and long-distance cyclist.

You can read an excerpt from Chapter Fifteen, “Retirement" Fulfillment Planning below and view the CNBC piece by clicking HERE.

From “Retirement" Fulfillment Planning:

What picture comes to mind when you read the word, RETIREMENT?

Is it Picture #1? A handsome, gray haired couple manning the helm of a restored, vintage sailboat in excess of 35 feet that had to cost them at least half-a-million dollars. Strangely, the sailing seems to take little to no effort, and all they do is smile lovingly at each other.

Or perhaps, Picture #2? A similar couple, equally as abnormally thrilled about their surroundings, playing their third round of golf——that day.

Or finally, Picture #3? The slacker couple, who have made it their lives’ work to simply siton the beach in khaki pants and brilliant white shirts toasting Pinot Noir looking over their shoulders at their modest, 5,000 square foot, right on the beach, second home.

Those pictures, or some very close variant, are what we’re fed by the banks, brokerage firms, and insurance companies daily in the advertisements flooding the screens, pages, and airwaves. But it is not just the advertisements that promote the non-stop pursuit of seemingly unreachable financial goals. It is also the way that most financial plans are developed——especially by the majority of planners who work for one of “The Big 3” proprietary product producers. In those plans, the pinnacle moment of the presentation is when the retirement projections are revealed.

The retirement plan becomes the central point from which all other recommendations are made. Cash flow should be strictly monitored to ensure that you're amply filling the retirement coffers that will serve you at some hopeful point in the future. Insurance is purchased so that the retirement plan can be protected under any number of unexpected circumstances. Estate planning is making sure that your retirement plan continues on even if you don't. Education planning is making sure that you save enough for your children's college so that you don't have to impinge on your retirement savings.

What is the downside of retirement centric financial planning? For most people, it creates a goal that feels out of reach for the majority of their lives. You stress to hide away all that you can in your early working years before you have kids. You stress to keep your savings objectives on track through the expensive years of child rearing. You stress to save anything at all during your peak expense years of having children in college. You stress to get caught up on your savings objectives after your kids have passed through college. And then, if you're privileged enough to reach some seemingly arbitrary number that should produce enough income to live off of without working another day, you stress because––for the first time in your life––you no longer have any power over your income and you’re forced to subsist off of what your aggregate savings can spin off in growth and income. If it sounds like a lot of stress, it is.

The biggest problem with our current view of retirement planning is that it rarely brings a level of satisfaction and fulfillment into the present. It's always about the future. It rarely helps serve the dreams and goals that you have in life, but instead becomes the goal in life; the goal around which everything else revolves. It discourages independence and creativity and seeks to bring people to the conclusion that their financial goals in life should be dictated to them by an “expert,” as opposed to drawn from them by a professional. Is it possible that this modern day notion of retirement and retirement planning is prescribed more for the benefit of those who are writing the prescription than for the patient?