Chapter 5
Essential Questions You Need to Ask and Answer
Are you working with a financial professional and do you know what assets you have and whether they’re growing to keep up with your future plans? Are you keeping your financial circumstances in mind without letting them dominate the asset review you have been working on here? Are you able to use your newly acquired and updated sense of ALL your assets into formulating the crucial questions you can be asking right now and getting the answers you need?
It would be so much easier if you could ask five universal, all-encompassing, permanent questions to obtain all the key answers you need to plan for your future.
However, the reality, as you know from your own life and our conversation so far in this book, is that while we share similar concerns with our family and friends, in the end retirement planning and life planning are as individual as shoes. Your preferences in terms of style, purpose, durability, fit, comfort, price, compatibility, fashion, materials, quality, design, and availability are likely to be different from those of your partner or next-door neighbor.
It would also be easier if the questions stayed constant across our lives AND the answers, as well as the plan, were permanent.
The reality is, unfortunately, that both the questions and the answers change periodically as life unfolds and time passes. You already know this at some level if you have ever been divorced, lost a job, buried a parent, changed careers, lived with trying teenagers, returned to school later in life, moved across town/the state/the country, or had a moment of artistic or nature-driven recognition—whether visual or auditory or tactile—that somehow changed you forever.
I’m going to give you questions to ask of yourself and others with the understanding that this is not meant to be a specific map or a checklist. The quality of the questions and the sufficiency of their answers to the degree possible are, in the end, up to you.
You are discovering here a revolutionary way to understand and build a modern retirement or life plan rooted in the realities of our present and our potential future, not in our own past or the past of others.
The quality of the question always drives the quality of the answer (I’ve said that before and you’ll hear it again).
Here are four major clues that will help you understand whether superior or inferior questions are being asked:
1.Does the perspective of the question match the situation? If it’s a big-picture situation and a little, tiny, detail-oriented question—or vice versa—especially one that can be answered yes or no, something is wrong. Perspective is important.
2.Is the question designed to distract and derail the questioner (and the audience) in order to avoid a particular subject?
3.Does the answer to the question in any way assign blame to someone else as a first step such as, “Who made this mess?”
4.Does the question represent a sincere effort to discover alternatives, answers, and possibilities not yet known?
Part of what I do for a living is to upgrade the quality of the questions being asked by my clients (individuals, couples, small to medium-sized businesses, and divisions of large businesses) so that the answer gives the highest-quality information and insight possible. This in turn leads to stronger strategy, a superior balance of planning and action, and increases the chance of success in retirement and in life.
It sounds easy. It isn’t.
PAULA AND JEREMIAH
Paula and Jeremiah came to see me about Paula changing careers. Recently, she had unexpectedly lost her long-term job and was angry, hurt, frightened, and didn’t know where to start. All she knew for certain was that she didn’t want to stay in the same industry. The question that consumed her was, “Why is this happening to me?” And that was pretty much all she could think about at the time. Jeremiah was there to support her but he didn’t get to say much.
Of course she was hurt and angry, but mostly she was embarrassed. Consider the four clues above. Then take a look at Paula’s question. Not only was the perspective disconnected from the situation, the question was, too. The question was not a sincere effort to gather key data. And I suspect the question she was asking was the first step on the path to transfer of blame. That’s a very low-quality question, indeed.
Acknowledging wholeheartedly that she deserved a reasonable time to grieve, I asked her to estimate how long that would take and to make an appointment for them to return to me and work on much better questions and answers.
Upon their return, the three of us worked together on her better questions. These turned out to be:
1.What would I like the next years of my life to be like?
2.How does work fit into that?
3.What are the best-fit work possibilities?
4.How do I get there from here?
This opened the door to holding the right perspectives and getting necessary information upon which action planning could be built.
Recently, a pre-retirement couple, Kayla and Dion, came to see me for advice. His single question was, “When can I retire?” Her single question was, “What can he find to do so that he isn’t in my hair all the time?” She didn’t want to be his one-woman, post-retirement entertainment committee and captive companion.
I asked them if they could set aside their questions for now and individually review their assets (see Chapter 4) as a place to start, coming back together to share their reviews with each other afterward. Dion jumped on the exercise. For him, some action, any action, was better than what he described as his “passive suffering.” Kayla was much more reluctant to review her assets. She hadn’t worked since the kids were born, now long ago, and thought of herself as not qualified to have assets that could be reviewed. I carefully explained that work didn’t necessarily mean outside employment. She had worked hard all those years running a household and being involved in the community. She had been building assets all the while. She just hadn’t thought about them that way until now. Think of how capable a CEO it takes to run an entire complex household and lifestyle, complete with four growing kids, making it look easy and graceful! How could she look me in the eye and say she didn’t have assets when, in fact, many of hers could be of equal or greater value to them in retirement and life planning than Dion’s were?
Tucking this revolutionary idea under her arm and marching out of my office with her husband to do her own asset review, she seemed to walk differently.
Kayla and Dion returned to meet with me two weeks later. Dion had given up all intentions of retiring, telling me, “I’m not in a financial or asset position to simply stop working. And on top of that, now that I’ve taken a hard look at my assets, I can see several of them have fallen in to neglect through my inattention. This feels renewing to me. How about working on a life plan instead of limiting our work to retirement?” Kayla said, “To my surprise, I now want to go to work part-time. It’s been so many years since I brought earnings into the household. On top of that, I can see that I’ve been under-stimulated and coasting. I deserve better than that and have already talked to a friend who runs a large shop about going to work for her three days a week. We both think it looks like a good fit, for her and me. I’m with Dion now. May we work on a life plan instead of focusing on retirement? We really want to take a look at our future and our assets.”
SPEAKING OF THE FUTURE AND SUPERIOR QUESTIONS
I admit it. We haven’t focused much on the future yet. Why is this? It’s because I firmly believe in getting a full and accurate take of our current assets, knowledge, and skills first. It’s very important to imagine a great, evolving future for yourself, provided you are imagining in reasonable time segments and not in one big, sprawling, long-term picture.
As we begin, what are some critical questions you should be asking yourself about your future?
1.What is a reasonable planning horizon for you?
2.What would you like to be the major elements of your life within that time horizon?
3.What would a representative day look like?
4.How much private time will you need regularly?
5.What would be the primary differences between your life now and the life you imagine?
6.If you are sharing a plan with a significant other, are you on the same page, having mutual clarity about common intentions?
7.If you are sharing a plan with a significant other, do you have enough space/mutual support and commitment for your individually different intentions, too?
8.What kinds of people and companionship will you need and want in your life? How many will be sufficient? What would characterize the interactions and connections?
9.Ideally, where would you live?
10.What are the features and amenities you will need in your immediate environment and community, wherever you are?
11.What do you need to let go of now with appreciation and leave by the side of the road as you move on because, no matter how useful it was in the past, it won’t be in the future?
12.What are the most likely variables that could cause you to have to adapt yourselves or the plan or both?
13.Who else needs to understand and support your plan and action steps?
14.What personal goals are you setting for yourself as part of your plan’s execution and for a richer life of your own?
15.Where would you start?
16.What steps would you have to take?
17.What is the risk of what you are considering?
18.What is the benefit of what you are considering?
19.How prepared are you really to have something throw a wrench into the plan so you have to adapt both the plan and yourself?
Terri and Devin were anxious to get going on their future. Retirement was a year away. The pressure to anticipate and plan was enormous. They felt as if they had to “get it right” immediately without time for transition and learning and successes and mistakes.
How many of us have been there, too, at various points in our lives?
They were especially anxious to get some breathing room, free of the responsibility of the last of their kids, jobs, home maintenance, employees, volunteer activities, and work-related travel. They had spent a lot of their lives taking care of others. Now it was their turn and they had to get it right!
If they had come to you for advice, what questions would you have asked them?
Mine were:
1.What would “right” look like? How will you know?
2.What would “really good” look like and how would it differ from “right”?
3.What is the cost to you of “right” versus “really good”?
Anthony, age 77 and a widower came to see me about creating a life plan. Having lived to that age and being in great health, he understood that, statistically at least, he was more likely than average to live quite a while longer. “I’m planning on 94,” he said. That gives me a 17-year planning horizon. I know enough about your work with my friends to know that I should be crafting a five-year, extendable/adaptable plan and not a huge road-map-style plan directly from here to 94 with no allowance for bumps in the road, hairpin turns, or refueling stations. Where do we start?”
He was ready to look at his future. Anthony wasn’t afraid of tough questions. He had already done a full and penetrating asset review.
I have a final few words about questions. Once you have crafted them and found answers, don’t throw them away. The quality of the question drives the quality of the answers. Planning participants need to unite around what the appropriate, high-quality question(s) really are before planning can begin or action taken.
Great questions that were part of formulating the plan can and should be asked regularly as reality checks and to see changes, both continuous and discontinuous. The list of best questions may be a living, breathing part of your imagining and acting upon your future. Some questions may remain. Some may fall away to be replaced by now-relevant others. It’s OK for the questions to evolve as your life and plan does.
Make sure that informed answers are a part of a larger pattern of going toward something as opposed to away from it. If the questions are selected and the answers chosen primarily around no, not, or moving away from something, this is an indicator of something that isn’t really about crafting a life After 50. It’s about escape. Escape may be essential as an interim stage but it doesn’t do well as an imagined life in the long run.