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Financial Advisors

Helping Clients With Their ROL, Not Just Their ROI

By April 12, 2016No Comments

Want to help your clients retire with a great ROL (return on life)? Then help them with something other than their money. Help them with the things money can’t buy; purpose.

An article from Inc., states that 91% of happy retirees are either “very” or “extremely” comfortable with their sense of purpose. On the other hand, 89% of unhappy retirees are either “slightly” or “not” comfortable with their sense of purpose.

The Advisor of the future will help people attain their financial goals and their life goals. If Stephen Covey was right when he said, “Start with the end in mind”, then start with death and work your way back.

Bronnie Ware spent several years caring for dying people in their homes as a hospice provider. She wrote a full-length book titled “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.” They are:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me
  2. I wish I didn’t work so hard
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier

(For more details read blog by Bronnie Ware in Huffington Post)

Writer Donald Miller posed the question in a recent blog, “Were you really created to be born, be bored, then be buried?” It’s nice to have the money you need in retirement, but what about having the “life you need” in retirement?

Bob Buford wrote a best-selling book about moving into the second half of life simply titled “Halftime.” He was a very successful communications entrepreneur who sold his cable TV empire over twenty years ago. He discovered that “success” typically described the first half of many a life, while significance is what people really desire in the home stretch.

The search for significance is on the minds of all your clients who are nearing retirement, whether they’ve verbalized it to you or not. Knowledge workers reach their mid-forties and they’re looking for a new stimulus – something to avoid the “boring” that comes between “birth” and “buried”. Everyone wants to finish well.

Consider finding a way to ask your clients these questions – in your own words – and helping them discover the answers:

  • What does a productive retirement look like to you?
  • If money were no object and you could do anything you wanted to do, how would you spend your time?
  • What talents and gifts have you been given and how will you use them with the rest of your life?
  • What would you like to leave behind that no one can take away from you?
  • What do you believe and what are you going to do about it?
  • What do you want to be remembered for?

(questions adapted from “Halftime”)

I know it’s not easy to add subject matter like this to your normal discussions about betas, alphas, standard deviations and the like. But when your client’s thoughts about money aren’t keeping them up at night, and something else is, it’s probably thoughts of significance and purpose.

Money is a means to an end. You’ve done a great job helping your clients plan for the financial future they’ve always wanted. Now help them plan for the life they’ve always wanted. Help your clients solve for “significance” so they can finish well, and you will be the Advisor of the future!


Bill Edmonds is an “Outside-Insider” (an Executive Coach and Consultant), who works with Financial Advisors to help them reach their full potential in the areas of organizational and personal development. A former Financial Advisor himself, Bill spent 24 years with Merrill Lynch until his retirement in 2014, where he led a $100+ million per year revenue wealth management business unit as a Director with the firm.


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