Retirement success? Plan for a marathon — not an extended vacation

Retirement planning would be easy if all advisors had to do was talk to their clients about saving enough money, according to Gary Sirak. But there’s a lot more to retirement planning than money, and Sirak has built a practice around helping clients prepare for aspects of retirement they might never have considered.

Sirak is the owner of Sirak Financial Services in Canton, Ohio. In his 40 years of advising clients, he listened to their stories and experiences. It didn’t take him long to realize that retirement planning is not just about planning for the financial side of the post-employment years. He took the insights gleaned from helping his clients on their retirement journeys and wrote the book How to Retire and Not Die: The 3 Ps That Will Keep You Going.

Most people think of retirement as an extended vacation, Sirak said. But he believes retirement is more like a marathon. Most people would not run a marathon without the proper training and preparation, yet people go into the retirement marathon believing that once they hit their target number for retirement savings, they’re ready to say goodbye to the workplace. The reality, Sirak said, is that would-be retirees often go into their post-working lives without the right preparation, and that preparation goes beyond saving enough money.

Sirak said he was “100% clueless” about what retirement meant to clients when he began working in his father’s life insurance agency 40 years ago. But after hearing his father’s clients tell their life stories as they planned for retirement, he began to realize that planning to have enough money in retirement is important, “but other things are important too, and I learned that there’s more than what meets the eye when helping people plan for retirement.”

As his career progressed, Sirak visited many of his older clients in hospitals and nursing homes, and he attended the funerals of many clients as well. This led to an “aha moment” that inspired him to write his book and change the way he focused on planning.

“I kept thinking there’s a better way to solve the problem of retirement,” he said. “The problem isn’t that they didn’t have enough money; it was that they didn’t know what to do with the rest of their days. I needed to learn more about how clients think about retirement, and I set out to help my clients and friends figure out what retirement is all about.”

The three P’s Sirak describes in his book are the three things he believes everyone must decide on when envisioning retirement: purpose, passion and plan.

Helping clients find their purpose

Sirak described purpose as “what you do for other people.”

“When I think of purpose, I see things I can do for other people that make me feel good,” he said. “It could be charitable work, maybe volunteering for a nonprofit. It could be mentoring young people. It’s about figuring out what you can do for others.”

Sirak said one of his retired clients had been a truck driver. He was bored in retirement and asked Sirak what he should do.

“I said to him, ‘What do you like to do?’ He said, ‘I like being on the road, and I like talking to people.’ I helped him figure out that maybe he could try volunteering with Meals on Wheels. He loves it, he gets to be on the road, and he delivers meals to 15 women every week. He says he made 15 best friends. That’s finding your purpose.”

Helping clients spark passion

Purpose may be what you do for others, but passion is what you do for yourself, Sirak said. “It’s what makes you happy and what makes you tick and what gives you joy at the end of the day. Passion is the stuff you love to do.”

The challenge in helping clients find their passion, he said, “is when I talk to most people, they don’t know what their passions are. They may know what they like to do, but they haven’t homed in on it. For example, I ask someone what they’re passionate about and they might say, ‘I like going to Italian restaurants.’ That’s great, but it’s not really passion. You have to help the client figure out what truly makes them happy.”

Making a plan

Retirement can stretch out for decades, and clients often don’t have a clear idea of how they will spend their time. Just as clients kept a schedule when they were working, they need to plan how they will schedule their days after they no longer have to punch the time clock.

During a client’s working years, “your days and weeks were planned out for you,” Sirak said. “You went to work, you went to lunch, you came home — your days were planned. Now, in retirement, they’re not. So you need to have a plan.”

Sirak said his father taught him about the need to have a plan for your retirement days.

“My dad retired to Florida, but then he came back to Ohio. Why? He said it was because he didn’t have enough of a plan to keep him busy full time in Florida. My dad carried a little black book, and in that book was a list of all the things he had scheduled to do that week. He played bridge one day, he played golf the next day, he had something scheduled for every day, and he planned it out for the entire month. And that resonated with me; I thought it was a very smart thing to do.”

Sirak has an exercise he does with his clients where he asks them to envision what they actually will do in retirement.

“I ask them to tell me how they will spend their first day in retirement, then their first week in retirement, their first month, their first year — what does that look like to them? So often, clients give me the deer-in-the-headlights look because they have had some kind of vision of retirement but they haven’t considered how it will play out day by day, year after year. 

“They might say, ‘We’re going to travel to Italy for a month, and then we’ll spend three months in Florida over the winter.’ That’s great, but tell me what you’re going to do when you get back home. And they have no idea.”

Putting it on paper

Sirak helps his clients get specific about their retirement visions by having them put to paper their loves, likes and hates.

“Loves, likes and hates don’t sound like much, but they are powerful,” he said. “If the client is still working, I ask them to write down everything they hate about their job. If they’re already retired, I ask them to write down everything they hate at home. I ask them to write down all the things they like, and that list is usually a short one, which is good. Then I ask them to write down their loves. The loves can be people or they can be things. Sometimes people list one person, but nobody has listed more than five.”

Sirak then goes over the list with the client to get more details on why the client listed what they did and how that will pertain to their retirement.

“Here’s an example: I have a client who said one thing he hated was cutting the grass. He lived in a house on three acres of land, and he had a lot of grass to cut. We figured out that he had enough money saved to hire someone to cut that grass for him and that would be one less thing he hated.”

Another client told Sirak that he loved to paint but hadn’t picked up a paintbrush in 40 years because he was so busy at his job. Sirak asked what types of paintings the client liked to create and encouraged him to take up the art again. The client signed up for classes at his local art museum, “and now he’s the happiest person you’ll ever see.”

Money comes second

When Sirak meets with a client to discuss retirement planning, he leads the conversation by asking the client what they like to do and how they envision their retirement will be. After the client begins sharing their retirement vision, then the talk will turn to how the client will fund that vision.

“It’s the opposite of how many advisors do it, which is to talk about how much money the client needs or how much they can invest, and then tell them how much retirement they can afford,” he said. 

“Everybody thinks retirement is about money, and it’s really not. Money is certainly a big piece of it. And then it’s not a big piece at all. You manage what you live on and where you are comfortable. I have clients who don’t have a lot of money saved for retirement, but they spend time with their grandchildren, they are active in the community, they have fulfilling lives doing things that don’t necessarily cost a lot.” 

Susan Rupe is managing editor for InsuranceNewsNet. She formerly served as communications director for an insurance agents' association and was an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor. Contact her at [email protected].