Ep 28: Rethinking 65 Retirement Realities: Featuring Keena Pettijohn & Dorothy Hinchcliff [Ep 28]

Episode 28 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (37:46)

Episode 28 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Keena Pettijohn and Dorothy Hinchcliff join Adam Holt and Derek Notman on an uncomfortable question: whether an advisor who has never retired, and is not yet 65, is actually qualified to guide someone through the transition. The conversation pushes back on a common assumption, that clients entering the withdrawal stage are not worth significant time investment, by pointing out that most household wealth in the United States sits with people over 50 and that this group is living longer and more actively than planning assumptions tend to allow. The strongest practical idea in the episode is the healthspan framing. If healthy years run shorter than total lifespan, a client planning an annual trip does not have twenty more years so much as a countable number of remaining occasions, and naming that number changes how a plan gets built.

What this episode covers

• Whether advisors can credibly guide a transition they have not experienced themselves
• Why clients approaching retirement gravitate toward advisors of similar age
• The mistake of deprioritizing clients who have entered the withdrawal stage
• Building relationships with a client’s accountant, attorney, and adult children
• Healthspan versus lifespan, and counting remaining occasions rather than remaining years

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holt. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today and be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Adam, are you actually qualified to advise people transitioning to retirement? I hope so. I mean, I’ve been doing it for 25 years. I’m a CFP. Right? Yeah, but you’re not 65. Well. Okay. Have you retired? Well, maybe yes, actually I have retired.

I retired from being an advisor and immediately took on a job five times an hour. Yeah, that’s true. I don’t know if I call that retirement. My job after retirement is to be a FinTech CEO. But no, you’re right. No, look, that’s a really great question. Most of the advisors, if you’re listening to this and you’re not over 65, I think it might be a wake-up call. What do you think? Totally. You know, if we’re supposed to be, I mean, this is one of the most instrumental transitions we will go through in our lives. One of the most impactful, largest things that we hope we never have to come back to.

You know, you don’t want to un-retire. I don’t think that’s a word, by the way, but. Can be. I’m gonna say it is for this. Come out of retirement. Yes, you can come out of retirement. Yeah, but so you chose to come out of retirement, although I don’t think you actually retired. But it’s a really big deal because everyone is going for that mark and we talk about all this retirement planning. I help people with retirement planning. But if you haven’t actually retired yourself and you’re not 65, are you actually qualified to do it? You know, I just realized something, Derek. So many of the people who have been in advice for many years, and you know that the average age of a financial advisor is still pretty high up there.

Upper 50s, and in some cases, some people will say it actually is lower 60s now. There’s thankfully a lot of younger people coming into the space. But when you think about somebody who’s about to retire, they tend to feel really comfortable around those who are of similar age. And if you listen back to episode 27 with JR Gonda, he talked about having different generational association with each of the clients, right? When you think about it, I’m going into retirement. Do I want my advisor to be 35? Yes, if I want them to be with me for the next 30 years. But do I trust that they know the questions to ask beyond the financial questions?

In other words, it turns out, as you’re gonna hear in our interview with Dorothy and Kina, that maybe we’re not actually asking the deeper questions that somebody who’s 65 is really asking themselves. And it may have nothing to do with your asset base or your insurance base or your asset allocation. Or even your age as an advisor. Even so. Well, let’s talk about our guests because we get the opportunity to interview some really, really cool people. And one of the things that came up for us, and it was actually present Derek in our last question, if you remember our community question, was talking about how to really approach retirement.

We’ve been always, I think, in our industry approaching it very mechanically, right? You’re gonna have enough money to burn down. You’ve got your distribution rate. You’ve got your guaranteed income sources. We tend to think of it and be called upon by our clients to go very technical on this one. Show me when I’m gonna run out of money. Give me probability. We used to use this awesome financial planning tool. But I think something got awakened in this discussion with Dorothy and Keenan. Now, tell us a little bit about Dorothy. Where is she coming from? Her and Keenan, really cool background. So Dorothy Hinchcliffe, her past, she was the managing editor and executive editor at Financial Advisor Magazine, which is, you know, is a huge publication.

I’m sure most of you listening have read it or even get it on a regular basis. And she was there for 20 years. She also was one of the architects of that magazine’s first Invest in Women conference. Really, really cool. And currently, she is the publisher and CEO at Rethinking 65. They wanna be this indispensable resource for advisors to help clients plan for a long life. That’s really well-lived and purposeful, not just the technical stuff you just mentioned about. It’s more of the qualitative stuff. And then also they help give advisors a greater voice. It was just really funny how Rethinking 65 and we’ve got Rethink.

I love how that’s just the line for us. But that’s what they’re doing over there. But that’s only half of the guest list today. Tell us about Keenan. Well, Keenan is a force. And I don’t know if you’ve ever kind of paid attention to what’s going on in the banking and the insurance side. And, you know, Keenan is the CEO and founder of LifeLogix Consultancy. And they’ve worked forever in the years of banking and insurance. And Keenan’s been an executive in these spaces. And I actually met her at BISA Conference, which is banking, insurance, and some other things. That’s not like asking me. But I never really love other things.

It’s one of the preeminent conferences that I got invited to in banking. I met Keenan there. She’s just such a passionate whirling dervish, just knows everybody. And she’s actually been involved in financial planning. In fact, the roots of financial planning with the last 20, 30 years before it was even cool, before you and I got into the space, she was doing stuff that we are, you know, blessed enough to talk about now because they were pioneers such as Keenan. So Keenan has a great attitude and I think you’ll appreciate, Derek, what she had to say. Let’s jump to that interview. I think everybody pay attention here because this is really important.

Think about now the context of the question we started with. What’s it like really to retire? I had to rethink 65 and shortly, I’ll be rethinking 70. And the joke was that if I would have known how popular I would have been come when I turned 70, I would have turned 70 earlier. So I do a lot of research about people in my age group and you had asked about my impression of financial advice and some of the key things that I’m intrigued with because I face them every day and I didn’t even know it existed until I found research to back into it and actually working with someone that understands what it’s like to be this age is very important.

So what I learned that bothers me is that health span is less than lifespan. I didn’t even know there was a difference between health span and lifespan. And I think I have to start there because obviously the average age expectancy for an American is in the 70s. 4 years of my life is gonna be in the unhealthy area. And that scares me. It scares me in the fact that they show a statistically that people that are over 65, yes, so I’m one of them, 88% of them are managing at least one chronic condition and nearly two thirds of them have dementia and some other health-related issues.

So one of the concerns is when an advisor is sitting down with someone, are you seeing that the bills are not being paid? Are you paying the bills? These things become a reality. We do have lots of things going on in our lives and our ability to do the day-to-day it becomes more challenging. This is a true story. My husband’s friend, his mother calling and calling her doesn’t answer the phone. Strangely enough, he drives to the west coast of Florida, knocks on the door, breaks down the door and his mom is sitting in an apartment in a fetal position with no air conditioning, no phone and no one to call.

That absolutely got me going. Remember I’m turning 70 that get my affairs in order. And from the financial advisor perspective, you start to realize how serious it is to get older. So that’s some really interesting stuff. And I think that’s really relevant to the financial advisor world. I’m really curious, Dorothy, with the work that you’ve been doing, especially around publishing, creating a lot of fantastic content for our space. Talk to us about what you’re seeing in the financial advice market today. The more important thing with Rethinking 65, which by the way is aimed at advisors serving clients who are 50 and older, because when you become 50, you start thinking about that second half of life and how you’re gonna make it purposeful and really meaningful for you when you’re going through a lot of transitions that no one really has a good roadmap for because people weren’t living old until really fairly recently.

Longevity has really increased. So the opportunities in life are also much greater. It’s definitely true what Keena was talking about. People do have to contend with health issues, but there are a lot of people who are also living healthier. And a lot of those people are clients of financial advisors. In fact, there are 75 million people in the United States now who are 60 or older. And that represents 30% of the working age adults, meaning people 18 or over. So we’re talking about a huge number of people. The problem that I’ve seen in the financial advisory industry is that there are a significant number of financial advisors who look at serving older people as not that profitable, meaning that, oh, they’re entering the withdrawal stage.

This means that they aren’t really a good demographic to invest a lot of time into. And I think that is a total mistake. I think that people, because they are living older and they are living more active, and the people in this country who have the money are people 50 and older. So no matter who you are as an advisor, whether you’re younger or you’re older, you have to be concerned about this market. And it has to involve more than just coming up with investments for people. A lot of the things Keena mentioned are very important to talk about because you want to be that trusted advisor.

You want to be able to keep not only managing the money but having a real relationship with your clients as well as their children. And that is, I think, one of the key things that is talked about, but I honestly see advisors focusing a little too much on investment management. While that is important, that’s how most of them get paid, it’s not enough going into the future, especially when you look at all the changes that are happening in the industry. And I think advisors need to pay a lot more attention to this. Thank you, Dorsey. You really bring up an interesting point about advisors being profitable in what markets to go after or not.

What are you seeing? What tips, strategies, tactics would you say to advisors? How can they serve that market while still running a profitable business indefinitely? First of all, I think you have to look at the idea that especially in the current economic situation with inflation and other concerns, when we talk about withdrawals, it’s not as though people are withdrawing all their assets in the first five years. The whole idea is they need to be invested to grow their assets, to have enough to live over a lifetime. Really, from my standpoint, maybe when you’re 90, you’re in a position where you’re drawing down your assets to a level where you might not have much or you’re thinking about leaving a legacy to your children.

But from 60 to 90, I think you really have to be concerned with how to maintain and even grow your asset base. So I think that advisors who wanna work with this demographic need to be sensitive to how can I keep growing assets for these clients even in the face of distributions. And the other part is that I think in order to have the kind of relationship with them that you’re gonna maintain over the decades, you need to do better outreach. Sending an email to clients once every quarter with generic information is not the kind of outreach that people really look for and that helps build relationships.

And the reason that I say that is because you have to know your clients well enough to be sending out some targeted things that when I say targeted, it’s still gonna apply to more than one person. This is a whole new experience that is just going to explode in the next 10 years. I appreciate what you’re both saying. And I’m curious, Keena, because you make this allusion to the fact that you’re going through these experiences as a financial advocate for people for years. And obviously you’ve seen a lot of how this industry has changed with respect to advice delivery, sales, distribution, banking, and so forth.

I’m really curious, what do you think that the advisory community really needs to hear that other distribution models haven’t been talking about? Obviously Dorothy has been doing this with Rethinking 65, which is really great to see, trying to change the conversation or at least add to the conversation. Keena, what do advisors need to hear? That’s a great question. What do they need to hear? So when they’re having a conversation with their clients and they’re hosting family meetings, there’s a lot of information that is being transmitted. And Adam, I’ve seen your solution, AssetMath, it’s phenomenal in the visualization of information, but there are clues that are being given throughout this conversation to have that dialogue.

So if you are dealing with the trust account, no, you’re not gonna necessarily be doing an insurance review, but obviously planning their legacy is critical. Having that conversation with the heirs, how they want their living wishes to be held to make certain that they have something as simple as a health proxy. So they’re giving you all of these clues in the dialogue. So if I had to sit with an advisor and I have three generations at one time, I may even have more, and I’m looking at the person that is planning the legacy, I’m gonna make certain that they do, do they have in fact a living will?

That’s just boilerplate. They may or may not for that matter, I may not be part of the trio of the accountant and the attorney. Do they also have a designation of a healthcare surrogate? I want to know. So when I’m sitting there with them, maybe they’re talking about their favorite foundation. I know I have been approached, who do I wanna get to a charity? So for an advisor, start thinking not necessarily of the assets under management, but the generations that you are dealing with immediately and beyond. And it takes not only an educator perspective, as you said, literacy and Dorothy, people are living longer, but you and I heard this and I had written this years ago, you start to become from the trusted advisor to more of the life coach.

And I didn’t create that understanding, but what that means is as money is transmitted, transpired, inherited, you are now looking at it from a 360 degree perspective. So it’s not just insurance, it’s not those are assets that they’re banging with. All the activity that is happening and you could monitor that, it becomes a conversation of value. Adam, to become more of a life advisor, it’s not just statements, it’s not just bank activity, it’s understanding their relationships of who can get access to the doctor’s records. I know I had that problem with my own mother. I was not designated as having access. I think starting, I don’t want it to be a religious experience, so to speak.

But when I was an advisor thousands of years ago and my office was done park at 57th, my joke was, if something should happen to you today, who do I call? And I immediately became part of the gifted three. I was the trusted advisor, was immediately introduced to the account, was immediately introduced to the attorney. Simple question. It’s funny because you just touched on why it matters to the advisors, right? What’s in it for the advisors? Very often we run this challenge where we know it’s the right thing to do. It serves the customer, it’s in their best interest to look out for their bigger financial needs and all the branches that touch it, that will really affect what they care about and what keeps them up at night.

And you’re right, it’s probably not about the portfolio investment allocation. Despite the fact that we are typically paid in that measure, it’s not what we’re always valued for. So I’m curious, what are the things that we all think about? Why is it important for the advisor to take action on this now in this empathetic view? What’s in it for the advisor? What does it mean to them if they do it? What it means if they don’t do it? Dorothy? I think what it means if they do it is that they’re going to have longer lasting, stronger relationships with their clients. I think, Adam, that it’s going to be easier and easier to just switch to someone else to handle your investments.

And really a lot of investment management is not really all that different from one advisor to the next. So I think that by building the relationship, by showing that you’re helping people with actually things that are part of life that are more important than the underlying investments. People want to have goals. They want to be able to do certain things. And the money allows them to do it. But a lot of times people aren’t really sure what to do or how to reach those goals. And an advisor, I think, that combines that with the traditional services of managing investments is going to stand out. I know that we’ve been talking about this for a while and why isn’t it happening at a faster pace?

That would be an interesting question to talk to a number of people about. But I think part of it is too that there has to be better ways for people to appreciate what advisors do and pay for that. Some of them are moving in this direction, but a lot of advisors aren’t really sure how to get compensated for doing these sorts of things. So I think we’re at the beginning stages of how to define that and how to make it part of a conversation that a client would say, okay, I get that. This is something I really need. And I think serving a lot of these other issues will help clients understand that an advisor does a lot more for them than just manage their money.

I just wanna say one thing and I know Adam, you’re gonna jump in. When I had asked, who do I call if something should happen to you? It’s very easy to grow a business when you have a relationship in front of you. Everyone wants scale. So here you have a relationship, whether you’re getting all the money or not. When I ask permission about who do I call or I ask the question, then they would provide me with the accountant and the attorney. I would say, do you mind if I introduce myself to the accountant and the attorney? This was a gold mine to me because I’d indicated that my name is and I work at and I work with and I started to present myself as that professional.

Little by little, I started to receive referrals from the attorney and the accountant. So this is an opportunity in terms of working. There’s very warm leaves and it also gives you much more opportunity with a face-to-face right then and there. It’s one of the most direct marketing programs I know. So that was kind of interesting, Derek. I mean, that interview went in a different direction than I thought it was gonna go but I hope advisors were listening. What did you take away right off the bat? I think in general, what I really liked about this episode and this conversation was that it focused a lot more on the qualitative side of things and that there is so much more to this thing we call retirement and what it actually means to our clients and to their kids and their grandkids and it’s not just Monte Carlo simulations and cashflow projections and blah, blah, blah.

So I found it refreshing that we were able to rethink this topic from another angle. So that was my overall general take. I did have a couple takeaways. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this as well but some of the things I came away with, there’s so much here. I would encourage people to go back and listen for sure but in general, people are living healthier, longer lives post 65, if we call that the magic retirement number and it’s true. I’ve been guilty of this myself. I’ve been like, I don’t know if I really wanna bring on clients in that age bracket. They’re spending all their money.

That’s gonna hurt my revenue. I’m gonna go find the 50 year old that’s got an old rollover instead, right? And I understand that thought process but Dorothy and Kina bring up some really valid points. People are living much longer. And if you have 30 years in retirement, well, I think that’s a challenge and an opportunity where why can’t we help our clients in that stage? Why can’t we build a really profitable business helping them make it through that, right? And to make it through that we have to help manage the money. We have to help them grow it and so forth. Let me stop you there because I have a good number of clients in our firm that are in that retirement distribution.

And I find that they’re much more loyal because disconnecting their advisor, I think fundamentally from their plan would be like kicking the driver out of your tour van halfway through the desert. Yeah, no, I’m committed. I’m in this thing. Let’s go, right? You need your guide, even if you don’t like them. And maybe they smell or something. I think the point is that there’s a lot more loyalty when you’re in the mix. So I really thought that that argument towards advisors being concerned around monetizing clients in their later years. I have not experienced that. I found them to be better loyal and actually even better referrers, believe it or not.

I would agree with that. Unless you’re dealing with a demographic that really is paycheck to paycheck, maybe they only have social security or very little assets. Okay, I understand that. But if you’re dealing with middle market, upper market, whatever you wanna call it, I think there’s a massive opportunity. And I think it’s important that if you wanna start a business today or transition your business or just stay with what you’re doing as an advisor, it’s okay to have this distribution challenge with your clients. And if anything, it’s more of a fun opportunity. Like, hey, how do I help them through this thing and manage their money and grow it?

Oh, I love that you say that because I have to tell you, getting to retirement has been relatively easy. Getting through it in the distribution is when I think we really are on our paycheck because it’s those decisions you need to make every year. Is this the right distribution? Do I have tax loss selling? Do I need to still have these insurances? Should we put them in trust? What does this mean for the kids? Are we already funded the education? The distribution point is actually really challenging. And the irony behind this, and you asked this question beginning, is our financial advisors actually qualified enough to really deal with that distribution because we know it mechanically.

We know it from a text. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Doing it is a whole nother story unless you’ve got a whole boatload of guaranteed income coming in and really the clients don’t care so much. Making it sustainable is really challenging in this interest rate environment as well as inflation environment. So I think people have to get off their heels and start leaning into the empathetic side and not just the numbers as well to be relevant. Well, and that brings me to my last point in the whole topic of this podcast today is maybe we’re not 65 years old as an advisor. Maybe we haven’t retired, but we’ve probably helped a lot of people do it.

And we’ve gained a lot of insight. And as Keena and Dorothy even say, like a lot of this is relationship. And to stop thinking about just the investments, but focus on the real relationships. And when you’re having those conversations and you’re talking about like, what does seven Sundays in a row look like for you? Instead of going to work every day. What does that look like? What does your quality of life look like now? What makes you happy? How are we gonna use your money to help you do that? If you start having those conversations, even if you haven’t retired yourself, but you’re gaining insight from the others you have helped retire and you’re just asking these questions, man, that is gonna resonate a ton with your client base and they’re gonna wanna stay in that tour bus with you no matter how bad you smell, to use your analogy.

Right. I don’t know where I’d come up with this crazy. That’s great, Derek. You know, I kept thinking of actually to myself, a trip that I took to the Middle East and we were in a tour bus. And of course we had a guide and I’m thinking, I’m very happy we have this tour guide right now, right? Even if he’s not pointing out all of the great things, I’m very happy that we have. You know, I thought that was really cool. And I would add to, Keena said something really interesting that I thought was a great phrase. She said, health span is less than lifespan.

And she realized it, as she said, turning 70 this year, that this is something she had to be now intimately conscientious about, not just theoretical, right? Whether she experienced, she told you the stories of her husband’s friend, as well as her own mother. And I think that was really important. We should all be listening for stories like that, because going back to what you said, it’s not about how much you wanna spend five, six, $10,000 a month after tax. Okay, I got that mathematically worked out. What do you wanna be doing every day? What’s gonna make you happy? What’s gonna create longevity? It’s gonna be purpose.

It’s gonna be intentionality. It’s gonna be doing the things you love and care about. And if you haven’t figured those out, maybe as advisors, we can actually help people figure out what those things are. Maybe we should be asking different questions than what tax rate should I assume in your later years. Those are where we tend to default, because we think the technical is what clients are asking for. But let’s also maybe ask them, hey, by the way, when we drive through this area, what foods do you love? What do you wanna see yourself doing? Paint me a picture of what that looks like, and let me help you achieve that.

Because it’s very rarely about the money. It’s about what the money gives us. If we focus on what the money gives us, and we’re part of that process, we connect ourselves emotionally to that process throughout the entirety of that journey. And I think that’s really important. When she said something about healthspan, Derek, what I heard was something that Jim Rohn had talked about on a tape that I’d listened to 20 years ago. You just said tape? It was an audio tape. Was that on your Walkman? No, it was in our car. Audio cassettes on road trips. That’s what my mom made me do. She would make me listen to Tony Robbins and Jim Rohn, and a whole bunch of other speakers when I was a teenager.

I love it. It’s all her fault, by the way. But what I remember that has sparked this idea for me, and I really want advisors to hear this, if you’re listening to this. I’m assuming since you’re here, you’re listening. He asked this question of a client, and this is something you can do today. When you hit retirement, how many more years of life do you think you’ll have? Well, let’s plan for another 20 years. As you said, life expectancy is going up. But for those with means, we know it’s obviously pretty high. What do you do every year that you love? Well, I go fishing with my son every year.

So we’ve got the next 20 years to do it. And Keena’s argument is like, well, if healthspan is less than lifespan, then maybe you really only have 15 years to do it. Jim Rohn’s argument would say, you don’t have 15 more years. You have 15 more times. And if you miss one, now you have 14. Now you have 13. And those are moments and opportunities that we can talk about to motivate people to say, okay, let’s be intentional about, we are absolutely gonna fund this project. This is how we’re gonna do it. Let’s think it out like a vision board. I know you’re a big fan of that.

And let’s actually help our client. Let’s spend a half an hour with our clients thinking about how they’re gonna go fishing with their son for the next 15 more times. Because it’s now precious. Dude, you’ve just like, with that quote in your cassette tape, like that is like, but that resonates so much. Like you tell me I’ve only got 15 fishing trips with my son left before I’m gone. Yeah. Oh crap. Maybe. Maybe, right? Like, you know, 15 years. Oh yeah, I got plenty of time. No, but when you start thinking about it like that, like time to get serious, what is actually important to me?

That’s true. Really cool. I love that. I love that. It’s scary, but it helps you get clear on what you actually want to do. Well, as a life coach for my clients, wouldn’t it be important for me to point out you have 15 times, not 15 years on a spreadsheet. And that’s important because maybe we should be going twice a year. We should double that to get the 30 times. So by the time we’re 90, we’ve had 30 fishing trips together. Think about the legacy I just created. And doesn’t that give you the chills? I mean, It does, dude. It does. I wanna be part of that.

Do you think that client’s ever gonna leave me, by the way, if we’re talking about this from a business standpoint? Or the kid. No, or the kid. And we’ve talked about multi-generational approach to planning. Yeah. If I help you achieve those things that you care most about. Oh man, golden. Is this really a business decision? No. Golden. It’s awesome. It’s awesome. I mean, that talk about being a good human and advisor at the same time. And I think that’s the point of thinking about what somebody over age 65 is actually now top of mind. They’re thinking, I got here so that I can live a certain lifestyle.

And by the way, it’s also on the opposite side, which is I’m gonna deal with issues that nobody wants to talk about. Who has those healthcare proxies? And I think we need to do a better job as advisors to help the clients be aware that this event is gonna happen. This event is gonna happen. And I wanna know what our plan is. So let’s take 15 minutes. Let’s take a piece of paper. Let’s write out what our plan is. What are we gonna do in this event? Nobody knows, by the way. Let’s figure it out. So at least we have an awareness of it. I think it’s really key to do that.

And I’ll leave with this last point. What I took away from this, and obviously it seems like a lot. I started asking my clients at the very end of our inspection process, which we called the 6Ls. And you can look it up if you’re interested. But I started asking people, what’s your hundred year legacy? And I got hooked on this idea because I realized that we were always planning for a 30, 40 year time horizon. We’re less, depending on how old the people are. And it allowed me to help them think beyond their lifespan to actually what’s the impact they’re gonna leave on the planet.

And of course, some people would say, well, I don’t know. I want my kids to have enough money, but not too rich. Some said, I wanna have this huge dynasty trust and I wanna make my next generation so I always remember my name. Everybody had a different answer here. Some said they wanted to make a difference in the planet. They wanted to do charitable things. So I think it’s a great question that we can use in our own practice to say, hey, you know, I’m curious, Derek, what’s the hundred year legacy plan? Typically, someone’s gonna say, well, I don’t know what, Don, never thought about it.

What’s that mean? Yeah, what do you mean? But it means it’s thought provoking. It means whatever you want it to be. But the question is, how is my team, my financial advisor team gonna help you achieve your next hundred year legacy plan? We’re gonna make choices today, but we’re gonna need to tour guide this one. We’re gonna need to be part of this process if you really wanna plan out the next hundred years. And by the way, nothing prevents us from thinking or doing and executing that kind of plan. The problem is no one’s asking the question. So of course there’s no plan. So the plan is default plan, which is the government will take its piece and the kids will blow the rest and the grandkids will see nothing.

And okay. And it starts over. You’re gone. 50 years, no one remembers you. That’s the difference. So go ahead. I love that question. And you know what? That doesn’t apply just to high net worth individuals. That can apply to any market segment, it really can. So awesome takeaways, Adam. Totally. Let’s get into a cool community question and we’ll wrap this thing up for everybody. So this is perfect because Derek, obviously I follow your LinkedIn content and your post that you recently made on LinkedIn went viral where you were cutting your tie and then Richard Branson got involved in this. So how are you getting so much growth on LinkedIn?

If I were to sum it up in one sentence, be a creator instead of a creeper. Create, don’t creep. It’s that simple. Weird. We’re gonna have to do an episode about that. Yeah, yeah. Are you a creeper? Yeah. And I’ll tell you, I used to be a creeper. Then I stopped. I got, I just, yeah, it doesn’t work. I think unfortunately a lot of advisors in our space do and we’ve probably talked a little bit about marketing. I won’t, we can do a deep dive on this, talk a little bit more about it. By no means am I an influencer, but I’ve had some decent traction.

Let’s put it that way and I’ve got some learnings because of it. Most influencers are humble like yourself. You are clearly an influencer. So I would say, yeah. Well, listen, people are following what you’re doing and they’re listening to your voice because you figured out a way to magnify it. I think maybe through podcasting, maybe, possibly. Maybe, maybe, yeah, that whole, yeah. Boy, I wonder. No, we should think about starting a podcast. That’s a great, wait, why are we recording this? I thought these were just fun Zoom conversations. Yeah, I’ve been recording our Zoom conversations for the last year. That’s what I’ve been doing. That’s kind of creepy.

Creeping, that’s pretty funny. Well, that’s great. Well, you know what, Les? We have to wrap up, but first of all, we want to thank Keena and Dorothy. Great, great insights. And of course, awesome contributions to our greater space. Keep doing what you’re doing. Of course, check out what they’re doing. Check out LifeLogix, check out Rethinking65. Contribute to that periodical. And I think, I think you’re going to see more and more great stuff from the two of them. Certainly in the social media as they’re really starting to expand. But also, of course, opportunity to be empathetic. Make sure that you subscribe to Rethink. Tell your friends about it.

Continue to magnify this content. Our hope for Derek and I is to mentor you and as well as to learn from you. So also find a way to contribute back to us like this. Send us notes, go to LinkedIn on our Rethink page and ask us questions so that we podest it. Any closing thoughts for me, Derek? No, man, I’m loving this. Thank you, it was a great episode. Advisors listening, like we are here for you. This is for you. Tell us how we can help you. And we may or may not do it, but we’ll try, we’ll try. We may or may not do this or be empathetic.

We’re trying. Well, we’re trying, we’ll think about it. We’re rethinking. Well, awesome chatting with you. Thanks everyone for listening. We’ll catch you soon. You got it. I’ll see you at Wealth Management Awards this week. Yeah, buddy. Good luck. Thank you for listening to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of AssetMap or Connector. The content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.